Calamitous
by embyr-75
Summary: In an age without a Hero, the Princess of Hyrule and her four Champions await the imminent rise of the Calamity. But when he arrives, the Calamity is not at all what they expect. [BotW AU, Calamity!Link, Zelink]
1. Prelude

_A/N: I KNOW I KNOW I have (an)other stor(y/ies) I'm supposed to be working on right now but I couldn't help myself, ok? I woke up with this idea this morning and I've already churned out 3,000 words. Please don't kill me. I'm beyond excited—clearly, or I would have the good sense to wait before I post this. Anyway, I hope this in some small way makes up for the fact that I'm overdue with the other project. Let me know what you think!_

 **Prelude**

Unholy light, crimson and garnet, bled out of the fissure in the earth, wafting upwards in gnarled tendrils like the hungry arms of a beast. The fissure had been growing, swallowing more of Hyrule Field by the day, and the foul, evil signs it had begun to spew could only precede one thing.

But the princess and her Champions were ready.

Zelda's heart hammered against her ribs as the light began to coalesce. Smoke mingled with blood, blending unnaturally and taking shape. She called upon her powers, breathing deeply as they infused her with a sacred glow. Her light was of unequaled brightness and purity—an antidote, forged by the gods to snuff out the incarnation of malice forming out of the evil bubbling from the earth before them.

The form took shape, and a cold wind snapped across their battlefield, clearing away the billows of smoke and shafts of red light. What it left behind was not like the hideous form spoken of in legends; from the distance, it looked nearly like a man. But the Champions didn't hesitate.

Mighty Daruk barreled forward, swinging his famed Boulder Breaker as though it weighed next to nothing. Revali the Swift rode the winds skyward, nocking his arrows and taking deadly aim. The Valiant Urbosa surged into battle, weapons blazing in the sunlight. Mipha, gentle though she was, brandished her spear and made a wide arc to strike from the side.

The figure raised his arm to block Daruk's blow, and the Boulder Breaker splintered on it. His fingers spread, and the Goron was sent tumbling by an unseen force, plowing across the grass and dirt away from the fight. Revali's arrows flew, but the Calamity made them fall of the sky with a glance. He summoned a squall that the Rito could not hope to tame, sending him spiraling uselessly. Urbosa changed tactics, throwing down her shield and snapping her fingers. She conjured a bolt of lightning, but the Calamity redirected the current before it landed, mimicking her gesture, and she collapsed as it struck her. Mipha nimbly leapt upwards, hurling her trident with lethal precision. But the Calamity bent back, just a hairsbreadth out of the way, and the spear stuck harmlessly into the dirt. A subtle breath, and the Zora was rendered unconscious at his feet.

Zelda's hand was extended towards him, pulsing with furious light. The Champion's attacks had been easily deflected, but the distraction was enough. The sealing power began to rush out of her, ready to engulf the battlefield. In the next instant he was there, his hand closed firmly on her wrist, close enough that she could see his eyes, brilliant and blue, and the threads of orange light warring for dominance inside them.

"Stop," he ordered; his voice was angry, certainly, but it was still a man's, not the monstrous, resonant thunder she had been taught to expect all her life. Still, she pressed on, urging the power's flow even as his fingers bit painfully into her wrist. He ordered again, more urgently, "Stop!"

Her breathing labored with the exertion, but still he fought back. Her pulse raced as his resistance registered.

This wasn't supposed to happen. This _couldn't_ happen. The light of the gods was the ultimate weapon, irresistible, preserved through generations as his sole weakness. Fear coiled in her throat, his muted snarl growing more feral as he slowly gained the upper hand. Her kingdom would never survive an assault from a being with this kind of strength. Hyrule would be reduced to ashes.

"How," she breathed, her voice trembling as she struggled to hold him at bay and with her own fear. "How are you doing this?"

He closed his eyes and took a deep, long breath through his nostrils, raising his left hand, balled into a fist, to show her the triangles burning through the back of his gauntlet. She recognized it as the source of her own power, only there were two brilliant shapes lit on his body instead of one.

Hot tears, visceral, born of both awe and terror, spilled down her cheeks, and she threw all her might into one final, desperate attempt to cast him back; light ebbed off them, a pair of burnished embers glowing brighter than the sun. And then he pushed back, and the light collapsed.

She gasped as her power was stamped down, utterly shoved aside by his own. She closed her eyes as her legs gave out, awaiting the frigid, unwelcoming hands of death. Would he kill her bodily, hungry for blood, snapping the bones of her neck cleanly, or impaling her with some dark weapon? Or would he crush her spirit in an irony of poetic justice, casting her mind into an abyss to await eternity, as she had meant to do to him? But instead he stepped forward, catching her before she could fall, slipping one hand around her waist and cradling the back of her neck beneath her hair with the other. His hot breath fell on her ear, and she shivered against his touch, warm and cold on her skin at once.

"Come along, princess," his low, worn voice breathed as she was swept up in darkness. "We have a long road ahead of us."


	2. Instincts

_A/N: Is this killing you?! Because it's killing me! Squeeeeeee!_

 **Instincts**

Zelda woke to the cool sensation of moss under her cheek and the telltale crackling of a nearby fire. She didn't move, trying to assemble her bearings. The memory of their failure in the field was still crisp, as were the foreboding words he had spoken before she lost consciousness. She strained her ears for traces of him beyond the fire: breathing, or weight shifting against bracken. Nothing.

Then two knuckles gently brushed against her cheek, and her blood froze in her veins.

Her eyes snapped open, and with a cry she let her power burst out of her in a deadly reflex. The fire went out from the force of it, rippling away from her in a shockwave. He grabbed her wrist again as they struggled, trying to contain her attack; her power splashed light intermittently on trees and stone as she twisted desperately to get away, tangled up in him in the darkness. He found her other wrist, pinning her hands under her throat and pulling her back against his chest. They were both panting; she must have caught him by surprise.

"Don't do that again," he warned her darkly, his breath heavy on her ear. His proximity made her skin crawl; or maybe it was his unearthly touch, so cold and so warm, as though ice and fire mingled together under his skin.

Suddenly he released her, and she stumbled to her knees, glaring back at him carefully. He lit the fire again with his arts, moving to sit beside it without sparing her a glance. She mustered her courage to speak.

"What do you want with me?" she demanded as levelly as she could. Her voice was quieter than she would've liked; it was as though his presence commanded silence. He didn't look at her, and she steeled herself to try again. "I won't cooperate."

He frowned at that, his already disgruntled expression deepening at her proclamation. "I'll accomplish what I set out to do alone, if I must," he growled. "Though it would be easier with a second set of hands."

For a moment she only stared, unsure of herself, and of him. "I don't—"

"Is the Sword in the Great Hyrule Forest?" he interrupted, and she blinked.

"What?"

"The Sword. The Blade of Evil's Bane. Does it still rest in the Lost Woods?"

She swallowed, a knot twisting in her stomach. "You wish to destroy it."

"I don't know that such a thing is even possible," he mused. It was not a question when he spoke next. "It has no wielder."

"No," she admitted, bitterly. Surely he must've known that all the legends said a hero wielding that blade would ensure his certain destruction. They searched far and wide for someone worthy of it, but the Calamity arrived before anyone could claim it. "You didn't leave us a choice."

His mouth twisted, unexpectedly, into a wry smirk. "I suppose not."

"You still haven't answered me," she insisted, infusing as much power as she could into her voice. "I demand to know why you've brought me here."

"You're hardly in a position to be making demands, Your Highness." She clenched her jaw; she could hardly argue that point. He stood before she could retort and crossed to her, crouching so that they were nearly eye level. The firelight was playing tantalizingly on half his face, lighting up a single blue eye coiled in orange filament. "If you do as I say, you will destroy me. With any luck, the pall of the Calamity will never fall over Hyrule again. That's what you want, isn't it?"

She studied him, breathless, caught between fear and a blind, baseless hope. If only it were that simple. If only every nerve in her body didn't scream at her to run the other way. She whispered, "I can't trust you."

"I'm not asking for your trust," he scoffed. "Only your obedience."

Her brow furrowed. "If I don't trust you—"

He reached out suddenly, his fingers brushing her lips, startling her into silence. He traced her jawline, her cheekbone, and she trembled.

"Does this feel like the touch of someone you can trust?" he murmured. "That icy, numbing sensation of evil trapped in this skin, grating on your nerves and pulling the warmth from your body and putting knots in your stomach, that urge to recoil that you can't quite obey—that is the warning from the gods. You cannot trust me."

He stopped, mercifully, and her eyes fell shut as she recovered. Her breath shuddered, and she dropped her face, fighting off a sudden, inexplicable rush of tears. He left her while she pulled herself together and sat at the edge of the fire again.

"I'm asking as a courtesy," he said curtly, once her breathing had leveled. "I could draw the answer out of your mind, instead, and it would be very unpleasant. So tell me plainly: is the Sword in the Lost Woods?"

She sighed, letting her hands unfurl in her lap. It was true that there was no warning concerning the destruction of the Sword by the hands of evil that she knew of, and she could hardly keep the answer from him if he could truly go inside her mind. She whispered, "Yes."

"Then that is where we must go."

The monster stared, preoccupied, into the fire. She briefly entertained the idea of running away, but to what end? Even if she could escape him, it was clear that her power was not sufficient to contain him, and the Champions, if they were still alive, could do little against to aid her in the face of his power. She knew better than to believe that he was telling the truth about letting her destroy him, but if ending him was even possible, she would have to discover the means for herself.

She scanned her surroundings in the soft glow of the firelight. It was unfamiliar, especially on a moonless night. "Where are we?"

"A forest beside the river to the east," he murmured, still staring intently at the flames. "It was called Applean once, but these things shift with time."

"It's still called Applean," she said, her voice nearly a whisper. She felt weak, drained by his presence, and she wondered if he was employing some dark magic to render her less volatile. She took a deep breath, trying to reinforce her defenses as she made to challenge him again. "If I agree to help you, what reassurance do I have that you won't kill me?"

"None."

"But—"

"We've established that you can't trust me. I've already told you that I'll be destroyed, which should preclude the possibility that I'll be able to harm you afterwards, but since you don't believe me that will be of little comfort. My only other recourse is to swear to you, but I doubt the word of a demon will mean much."

She pursed her lips, absently wrapping her arms around herself against the chill of the night. Where she landed was just outside the warmth of the fire, but she reeled at the idea of moving any closer to him. "Given the alternative, I would rather have your word than none at all."

"Then you have it."

She shivered, the cold starting to get the better of her. "Legend says your powers transcend time and space. Can't you just snap your fingers and take us there?"

"The Deku Tree prevents it," he answered with mild distaste. Then he tilted his head towards the fire, considering. "And I would like to see Hyrule one last time."

She sighed despite herself, and her teeth chattered. "You aren't at all like I expected."

"No?" He eyed her from across the flames, and then stood, wandering in an arc into the woods, until she couldn't make him out in the shadows. Not seeing him was nearly worse than being nearby; her heart thudded unevenly and her body tensed, half expecting him to lunge out of the darkness transformed into some kind of hideous beast with a maw full of a hundred sharp, crooked teeth. Eventually he emerged from the dark, splashed in firelight and shadows. She turned to face him, inching away as he slowly stalked forward. She felt the heat of the fire cascade over her back as she entered the ring of its light, and he stopped, crouching to watch her where he was. "And what were you expecting, then?"

Her shoulders eased as the fire flooded her with warmth, and she sighed. "I don't know. Something else. Something with talons and fangs, mindless and bloodthirsty, with a body of fire and eyes like blood."

"A pig snout, perhaps?" he mused, his eyes glinting with dark humor.

Many accounts had claimed he would have one. She watched him pensively, lulled by the fire and the fact that he hadn't come any closer for a few seconds. If it hadn't been for his inhuman touch, the power that radiated off him and the orange threads spooled around his placid blue eyes, she might never have known what he was. His features were pleasant, handsome even, framed in a curtain of hair the color of sun-ripened corn. His coloring was paler than it ought to have been, but in the firelight it wasn't so apparent. Perhaps that was part of the deception, part of what made him so deadly. Still, it seemed odd that the writings never mentioned it, always shrouding him in convoluted metaphor.

She thought of the tales of his ruthlessness, of his lack of control, of how he would burn everything he touched and turn castles to rubble and towns to ruins mere moments after his birth. He was evil, certainly—every instinct and reflex in her body told her so—but not the embodiment of frenzied hate she had thought he would be.

"Tell me," he murmured impassively, pulling her from her reverie, "what do you know of the last Rise of the Calamity?"

"It was eons ago," she murmured. "Legend says a princess housing a sacred power and a Hero wielding the holy blade came up against the Calamity with an army beyond reckoning, lost to the sands of time. They fell to your power, but not before you were sealed for another ten thousand years."

"Both of them?"

For a moment she held her breath, caught off guard by the threatening edge in his voice. She forced a jerky nod. "According to legend."

He sighed, an unexpectedly human sound. "It was foolish to hope it would be remembered differently, I suppose."

"What do you mean?" she asked, comprehension slowly dawning. "What really happened, ten thousand years ago?"

His eyes slid to hers, darkening. He murmured, "Go to sleep, princess."

With a wave of his hand, darkness was drawn over her mind like a heavy curtain, and she slipped quickly, peacefully, into something dreamless, and knew no more.

It was morning when she stirred again. The remnants of their fire were blackened and gray with cold. The hair on the back of her neck rose, and she knew he was close. She looked over her shoulder cautiously; the Calamity was sitting against a tree, only a few feet away. The sunlight was trickling through the leaves over his head, dappling his face in soft, tremulous shadow.

She sat up slowly, stretching a little against the soreness in her back from sleeping on the ground. She hadn't exactly had a chance to get comfortable before he forced her under. But waking up at all was something of a pleasant surprise. He didn't acknowledge her, though he must've been aware that she was awake by now. She pulled her hair to one side and ran her fingers through it, mulling over her predicament, and scowled drowsily as her eyes fell to the mark etched on her hand. She would never have guessed that the same power that was supposed to be their salvation would also fuel the evil that was now her captor.

The sound of him biting into an apple made her start. She looked at him again; he was staring at the apple, frowning.

"Typical," he muttered, chucking it over his shoulder.

Then he turned his clashing, ribboned eyes on her. His calculating gaze scanned her briefly, looking for something, and she fought the urge to shrink under it. He finally stood and tossed her another apple.

She caught it with surprise. "What's this?"

"Breakfast," he answered gruffly.

She stood in his cold silence, enduring his stare with the little wherewithal she could muster. Her nerves were unsettled again, set on edge by his presence; she could feel the evil wafting off him like a cool breeze, prickling against her skin. She honestly wasn't sure she would be able to keep anything down. "I'm not hungry."

"Eat," he demanded, his frown deepening.

"But I—"

" _Eat_ ," he said again inflexibly, crossing the distance impatiently and drawing the hand holding the apple closer to her mouth by the wrist. She suppressed another shiver at the strangeness of his touch, staring unwillingly at the fruit. "We have a long road ahead of us and you need the energy. Now eat, before I set a field ablaze or cast a pestilence into a village."

She didn't know how seriously to take the threat, and wasn't willing to find out. She forced herself to take a small bite, trying to placate him, and chewed it thoroughly into oblivion before she swallowed. Satisfied, he turned north, clearly expecting her to follow. She looked longingly in the other direction. She couldn't possibly leave him to his own devices, but her simple Hylian instincts quailed at the idea of getting any closer to him than she already was. But she knew what she had to do; he seemed to know that she did, too, for he didn't turn back to see whether or not she followed, confidently heading towards the distant bend in the river. She took a steadying breath, and then took another bite as she fell in step several paces behind him.

They walked in silence while she finished her breakfast, her gaze fixed solidly on the back of his head. She let the apple core drop onto the forest floor, trying to conjure a plan. Her heart ached for the others, who could still be strewn about Hyrule Field for all she knew, and for her people, who were in very real danger. She took a breath and marshaled her courage, beating down the instinct to flee as she purposefully closed the distance between them.

"You didn't answer my question last night," she demanded, and he glanced back, sneering, affording her a glimpse of his profile.

"And if you don't want to be unconscious for the rest of this trip, you won't ask again."

She quelled her reactions—a bitter retort, a tremor of fear, a flare of frustration—calling upon the calm of her prayerful meditations, which she knew so well by now.

"Very well," she conceded. "What questions am I allowed?"

"Try asking a few and you'll find out."

It sounded more like a threat than an invitation, but she chose to press on. She certainly wasn't going to trail him in submissive silence the entire way. "We're going to the Great Hyrule Forest?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"That's where the Sword rests," he droned, as though she were being unusually dense.

"I know that," she bit back. He rattled her so easily, poking and prodding until her anger could override her fear of him, which she was not ashamed to say was great. It was astonishing, actually. "But why do we need the Sword?"

"To destroy me," he answered simply.

"I have the power of the gods," she offered grimly. "If you would stop resisting, I could destroy you now."

He laughed once, bitterly. "Sealing me away would not destroy me."

"But the legends—"

"There is no mention of my destruction in legend," he interrupted. Again. She puffed a quiet sigh. "Under normal circumstances, destroying me would not be possible. I am a curse; part of a cycle, unending, that started before Hyrule was."

"Then teach me how I should destroy you," she suggested, going so far as to wear a convincing smile. "I would be a more than willing student."

"No doubt," he sighed. "But I'm afraid you just don't have the power."

They reached the edge of the forest. The Castle Town Watchtower and the city walls, and the spires of Hyrule Castle beyond it, rose up in the west. It looked so peaceful; she braced herself, wondering if the farce would suddenly end, the Calamity beside her would turn into a snarling, raging beast, and the Castle would spontaneously burst into flames. But the morning kept on, unchanged, bathed in warm sunlight and distant birdsong.

She realized she was staring and turned her attention back to him; he was staring at her. An expression crossed his eyes, something like disappointment, and he scowled, moving towards the road again.

"Come on," he growled.

She followed, frowning a little at his sudden change of mood. He had seemed almost amicable when they were talking about his own destruction. "I have more questions," she ventured.

He sighed in a dramatic display of his longsuffering. "I don't doubt it."

"Why are you doing this? Why would you voluntarily destroy yourself?" He gave her a deadpan look, his eyes darkening dangerously, and she grimaced. "I'm not allowed to ask that one."

"No," he confirmed, "you're not."

They fell into a spell of silence as they crossed the last greenbelt of Romani Plains to the road. Then he turned, moving towards Orsedd Bridge, and she blinked, scanning the north road. "We're taking the road beneath Crenel Peak? Isn't it faster to—"

"We head east," he insisted gruffly.

She trotted up to him as he began to leave her behind, still confused by his choice to take the longer route. He was already under the archway that heralded the gateway to Hyrule Field when traveling in the other direction. "But—"

"I know we're both in a hurry to see me dead," he growled, "but the north road would keep us in the shadow of the Castle until we could cross the river."

Surely he wasn't worried about being spotted, was he? What could the Castle guards possibly hope to do to him? Her brow furrowed. "What does that matter?"

He pressed his hand tentatively, gently, against the stone of the archway, watching the contact with an intensity she didn't understand. He ran his fingers over it slowly, deliberately; the gesture was almost longing, and she heard his breath quicken.

"It's so tempting," he whispered, something animal and dark in his tone that made her blood chill. "You have your instincts. I have mine. It would be so easy… to just reach out…"

He closed his eyes, laying his forehead against the stone, and took a shuddering breath. She watched him, her stomach knotting, knowing she should be afraid but not yet knowing why. When he opened his eyes again, the orange threads in them were glowing bright amidst the blue, and the breath stole out of her chest.

"To just reach out and destroy it."

The stone under his hand shattered with a sound like thunder, the archway blowing apart above their heads. The force of it sent rubble and dust and splinters of stone heaving in all directions, raining over the field like an inescapable hailstorm. She felt the evil ebbing out of him, snarling, yearning for release, for destruction, smothering her with its darkness. It coiled around her, promising decay and ruin and pain, swirling behind her eyes and dripping on her tongue, striking the purest kind of fear deep into her heart.

She ran. She called upon her power, throwing herself across Hyrule with all her strength. Fields and hills rushed past her in a blur; she weaved, unseeing, driven by instinct, through forests, through water; and at the edge of her consciousness, awakening with a snarl of rage, she felt him pursuing.

The Calamity rushed toward her with speed she could never hope to outrun, darkening her mind as he drew closer like a shadow. Her panic spurred her on, but there was no escape. His hand clamped down on her wrist and she screamed.

She thrashed against his hold, light blazing from her desperately as she tried to break free, as the battle between them transcended their physical forms, escalating to a war of light. With the same suddenness, the same severity of their first battle, he stamped out her light, trapping her in a painful grip against his chest. She felt his hot, furious breath against her cheek, the burning, icy sensation of his arms holding her tight, rendering her helpless. The primal, ancient fear of him, buried deep in her, writhed to life, and she screamed again, a long, awful sound, grating against her own ears as tears slid down her cheeks.

His voice was a roar, deafening and enraged, his grip tightening as he shouted in a punishment that efficiently killed her will to struggle. "Do not run from me! I will reduce this world to rubble and ash if you run again! Do you understand?"

She gasped between her sobs, trying to breathe through her fear. Finally, she nodded weakly, unable to manage much else besides the soft, pathetic sounds leaving her with every breath. He dropped her and she collapsed to her hands and knees, an exhausted, frightened mess. She held herself, stealing a glance in his direction as she tried to pull herself together. He seemed to be doing the same, his breath shuddering out of him as he worked to be calm.

They gave each other a moment, and she let herself hiccup a few more times before she tried to speak again. Her voice was a sad warble. "I didn't mean to run. You frightened me."

He sighed, running a hand tersely through his hair. He turned and knelt in front of her, taking her shoulders in his hands that were so warm and so cold at once. His voice was controlled, but his grip betrayed his tension. "You have to fight your instincts, Zelda, just like I have to fight mine. You can't run from me again. You're the only thing keeping me from burning everything I touch, do you understand? If you leave me, there will be no one to stop me when I—"

He paused, the muscles jumping in his face, and he stood again, turning his back on her.

She sniffled, holding herself tighter. She didn't even know where they were; their merry chase seemed to have taken them far, though, with a chill in the air she hadn't felt on the plains. She croaked, "How do you know my name?"

"What?"

He had turned, and they were staring dumbly at each other in the sun. A wind carried over the wilds, tangling her hair, and she absently brushed it away. His eyes were glued to hers, a war of blue and orange lit by the daylight.

"You called me Zelda," she clarified in a tiny voice.

He stared at her until neither of them could take it anymore. He looked away, sighing quietly, so imperceptibly it could've been the wind.

"You're always Zelda," he said.

And that was the end of that.


	3. Duality

_A/N: Wow, this took forever. Sorry for the delay! I had an awful time editing this—I actually threw the entire thing out once, and then ended up recovering it and rewriting half instead. But here it is!_

 _Thank you so, so much to the awesome people who reviewed, I love getting your feedback! (NO I WILL NEVER STAHP!) Hope you enjoy this one._

 _(EDIT: Revised on 10/29/2018)_

 **Duality**

Running had been a mistake. She thought her trembling had been just a side effect of her adrenaline, but when she couldn't stop shaking long after the fear had passed, she realized it was from overexertion. She had to stop for rest frequently, making their journey that much slower.

Not to mention it had agitated the Calamity, who had since taken to hovering too close by for comfort whenever they stopped and constantly glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was still there.

Their mad dash had taken them all the way to the edge of the Faron Grasslands, just about as far from the Great Hyrule Forest as one could get.

The Calamity wasn't happy about that, either.

She stumbled again, for the umpteenth time that day. But instead of growling at her to keep up as he had every other time, the Calamity sighed, scowling, and walked back to help her to her feet. When he didn't let go of her arm, she froze.

"I'm all right," she protested quietly.

He ignored her. His gaze was fixed on the horizon, power building behind his eyes, and his hold on her tightened just before he took a purposeful step. That step sent them spiraling over a blur of landscape that tumbled sickeningly by, and an instant later she collapsed dizzily on the shores of Lake Hylia. New exhaustion washed over her, wracking her body with chills and aches.

"Drink," he ordered darkly, and she managed to drag herself close enough to the water to reach her hands in. She drank until her throat ached from the cold.

By the time she was done he had already sparked a blazing fire and was roasting a fish skewered on a makeshift spit. With a tremor of disgust she realized it wasn't quite dead yet. Still, she moved closer, drawn by the heat.

"That was awful," she finally managed, wiping her mouth against the back of her hand.

"Your body is giving out on you," he murmured, frowning. He tousled the fire with a wave of his hand, willing it to burn brighter, and sighed once impatiently. "You're too fragile."

She was too tired to take offense. She watched the pale tongues of flame lick at the dwindling light, her trembling slowly beginning to subside. "We could be at the mouth of the forest in less than a day, traveling like that."

"Yes. But you'll need your strength once we reach the Lost Woods. It saps too much of your power."

Her skin prickled in the silence that followed; even surrounded by the relative peace of the lake, the darkness ebbing off him in waves prevented any real rest. Her fingers bit into the dirt and wet rock, splaying in the short grass, feeling for the familiarity of it like an anchor. A breeze raked over the water, pulling at the fire and her hair.

"Why are you really taking me there?" she whispered, asking the wind as much as she was asking him. "What in all the realms could you possibly need me for?"

He eyed her quietly. "Do you doubt your own strength? Or my intentions?"

"Both, I suppose."

"Greater heroes than you have failed where I was concerned," he said, turning the spit once. "Don't let your failure to contain me make you question your own power, or your destiny."

She parted her lips, bemused, but swallowed her inquisitive reply. Reassurance was hardly the response she'd been expecting. "And as for the other?"

"I am a demon," he said simply, the orange filament in his eyes glinting in the firelight. "You'd be a fool not to."

"So it was a lie?"

"I didn't say that. But would denying it make a difference?"

She sighed, bristling at the conclusion. There was so much at stake— _too_ much. She didn't understand how he could expect her to operate under a veil of doubt and half-truths.

"If what you say is true, then we are working towards a common goal," she reasoned aloud. "Even you must be capable of some degree of honesty."

He glared. "What's your point?"

"We could come to an understanding. This would be so much easier if I could trust that you would at least—"

"No."

"Why?" she demanded. "I can't in good conscience follow you blindly towards some unknown end!"

"You don't have a choice," he snapped. Then he visibly checked, and she reined herself in, too, knowing it would be unwise to provoke him. "And neither do I."

She frowned, questions burning in her throat like coals. The disjointed, untethered threads of him drifted aimlessly through her mind, leading her nowhere. An obsession with a Sword he could never touch; his resentment when she had asked for the truth of a misremembered legend; the obstinate, unswerving notion that any attempt to forge trust between them was unallowable; and now, a sudden admission that he felt he had no choice.

She took a chance, prodding him gently. "Meaning?"

"Meaning I will drag you to that pedestal by your hair if I have to."

She sighed, crossing her arms. "That won't be necessary. I can't leave you to your own ends. We can make it back to the plains by nightfall."

He scoffed. "You'll be useless to me if you fall apart on the road. We spend the night here."

"But it's not even sunset—"

"Yet another inconvenience caused by your little jaunt," he sneered. Then he sighed irritably, like he was reprimanding a child. "You're in no condition to travel."

"It wouldn't have happened if you hadn't blasted that archway into oblivion," she batted back, defending herself before she could think better of it, and he growled aloud, his tolerance strained to the limit.

"Do I ask you not to sleep? Not to breathe?" he demanded. "Yet you expect me not to destroy."

She narrowed her eyes at him, disgusted. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble."

"It's a great deal of trouble, actually," he bit back, and then he turned the spit once, frustrated, and they fell into another strained spell of silence. Then he took the skewer off the fire and shoved it into her hands. "Eat."

She did as she was told, picking at the crisped scales bitterly, and gingerly tasted a piece. The meat was warm, and she suddenly realized how hungry she was. She hadn't had a proper meal since before he had taken her, and she'd expended tremendous energy since then.

Zelda watched him carefully when she was done, pressing her mouth against the back of her hand. "You aren't going to eat?"

He snorted. "I don't eat."

"You were eating an apple this morning."

His eyes slid to her again, flashing with irritation. "It was an experiment."

She tilted her head thoughtfully, trying to puzzle him out. "You don't eat? Not at all? You must need some kind of nourishment—"

"Yes, and I'm abstaining, for your sake," he snapped acidly. Then his eyes pierced into hers, two-toned and lustrous in the firelight, and he growled, "Now sleep."

She took a hasty breath to object, but before she could he was sending her spiraling under again. As her eyes closed and her consciousness slipped out of her grasp, she felt her body give out, and his unmistakable touch, both warm and cold, cushioning her head before it could hit the ground.

In her dreams, something monstrous, full of smoke and hate, was roiling out of the sea, and the Calamity, clenching the Blade of Evil's Bane in his fist, stood between them, his silhouette ringed in darkness and light. The storm descended on him, engulfing him with deafening winds and lightning strikes, but he let it come, motionless, standing his ground even as it swallowed him whole.

The fire was out when she came to, and she shuddered gently against the chill.

There was dry, brittle grass beneath her; it smelled of mesa winds and too much sunlight. She blinked as she sat upright, trying to get her bearings. They weren't at Lake Hylia.

There was desolation as far as the eye could see—nothing but charred remains where life once was, blackened, shriveled, sapped of form and color and dusted with ash. The air smelled of fire and charcoal, and smoke rose out of the dust like so many spirits trying to ascend. Her eyes darted along the devastated plain, to the crags that flanked it, to the mutilated, scorched figures breaking out of the ground that had once been the trees, and she covered her mouth, biting back a gasp or a scream. In the fog of the disorientation and the dread, her mind snagged on a scrap of familiarity: the disfigured, towering trees bent and broken over the valley. They could only have been the wasted remnants of the Taobab Grasslands.

A sound broke in her throat; she whispered, "What have you done?"

"It will grow back." His voice, unaffected, dispassionate, sounded from so close by that she held her breath in silent alarm. He was just at her back. She turned her head, very slowly, to glare at him. He took a handful of the grayed sand, watching it trickle out of his open palm. "In a hundred years or so."

Her eyes burned with angry tears and ash. She hated how powerless she felt, lashing out with what little she had.

"How did we get here?" she demanded, but for all the anger she infused into her voice he wasn't the least bit disturbed.

"I carried you."

Her stomach roiled, and she closed her eyes, trying to quell her nerves and not picture herself in his arms, limp and helpless, as he stalked across Hyrule under a faint sliver of the moon.

"Why?" she hissed, her voice a bitter whisper. "Why would you do this?"

"Do you know what lies between us and the Woods?" he asked, quietly, and her mind traced the route beside the Great Plateau, speckled with settlements: the Outpost, Gatepost Town, Deya Village, Kolomo Garrison, the fragile intersections of so many lives. He couldn't have known those settlements from his own era. He must have been able to sense them—smell them, like a ravenous beast can smell shed blood. His eyes, brilliant blue in the morning light, ringed in so many orange threads, peered curiously into hers. "If you had to walk through a lush orchard, heavy with fruit, but you weren't allowed to take any, would you trust yourself to do it hungry?"

She felt her mouth quiver and clenched her jaw to still it. "You're a monster."

"Yes," he said, so softly her brow puckered in surprise, and then he stood, leaving her in her small patch of untouched grass, and wandered into the wasteland he had made, kicking up dust and ash. He called, weaving through blackened trees towering like maimed giants, "Come along, princess."

She quashed the unpleasant tangle of doubt stirring in her chest, moving to follow. More than once, she saw him breathe deep of the destruction, running his hand along scorched trees and through plumes of black smoke. Luxuriating in it. It made her stomach churn. She stepped carefully through a brittle splay of old roots, tangling up out of the sand as though they had tried to escape him. Suddenly he laughed, and her eyes snapped up to his.

"The look on your face," he chided, smirking roguishly. "The crown princess of Hyrule, the blessed daughter of Hylia—so easily riled."

She glared icily. "The incarnation of Hate—reduced to taunting mortals."

He crossed his arms, leaning against one of the ruined trees as he watched her. "I can go back to razing continents, if you'd prefer."

"No," she admitted, sourly. "I would not prefer it."

His smile widened. "Pity."

She waited, in stony silence, for him to do something—move, or mock her some more. He seemed content to simply watch her bristle.

"You're a lot like her, you know," he finally observed. "Your predecessor, I mean. Stubborn, self-righteous—that gentle flush when you're angry."

She scowled, painfully aware of the blood rushing to her cheeks. He shrugged off the tree and moved closer, his eyes narrowing as he inspected her.

"She was older than you are now, though. Wiser. And your eyes are the wrong color." He tilted her chin up gently with the edge of his finger, ice and fire on her skin. "Green, like the Faron Sea in the dawn."

He held her like that a moment longer, rendering her motionless while he studied them. Cold slithered down her jawline, sprawling along her bones like hoarfrost. She snapped her face aside when he slid his fingers away, trying to hide her disquiet beneath a veil of contempt.

"If my eyes don't please you, you're welcome to not look at them."

"I didn't say that."

He was grinning, and she flushed angrier, her heart stammering unevenly through her jugular. She checked before she spoke again, knowing that another bitter retort would only serve to amuse him. Enduring his mockery was a relatively small price to pay for his sudden good mood. She walked on and headed north, breathing deeply when her nerves crackled in protest as she turned her back on him. The Great Plateau rose up like a mighty sentinel at the end of the plain, impassively overlooking the destruction. She made for the eastern ridge of the canyon, where the staggered outcroppings made the wall less impassable.

"Did you drag her all over Hyrule, too?" she muttered, doing her best to act disinterested as she tried to riddle out the past he protected so fervently. "She must have made quite the impression if you can even remember the color of her eyes."

"Does it come as a surprise that I would commit to memory the face of the entity who has imprisoned me in endless oblivion too many times to count?" She hesitated as she approached the canyon wall, fearing the conversation had turned downhill irretrievably, but he chuckled once. "I think you underestimate how much I hate you."

She braced her hands on the stone, resisting the urge to roll her eyes, and lifting herself to the first summit. The damage was becoming less apparent as they scaled, singed grass and scored rock gradually giving way to green slopes and untouched boulders. He had completely dodged the question, though, so she tried something else.

Her eyes trailed the stone for a foothold as she reached a taller obstacle. "Why take me along, then?"

When she looked up, he had gotten ahead of her, and was complacently offering her his hand. She took it begrudgingly, letting him lift her onto the lip of the path, and he gave her a small, wicked smirk. "Snack for the road."

She huffed loudly, brushing past him again. His good mood didn't make him any less elusive; if anything, it only made him more annoying. She chose her route with care, managing to reach the crest of the ridge without needing his assistance again. The slope on the other side was incredibly steep, lush with dewy grass and ribbed with dark stone, swept regularly by winds off Lake Hylia. She forced herself to take the first steps of what she knew would be a slow, treacherous descent.

It wasn't long until the slick footing got the better of her, but he caught her elbow before she could plummet down the hillside. She snatched it back irritably.

"Stop touching me," she snapped.

He complied, letting her slide roughly onto her bottom when the slope turned slippery again not ten steps later. She sighed, closing her eyes and pressing her forehead against her hands as she sat exasperatedly where she had fallen. The Calamity crouched beside her, wearing a much smaller, much less infuriating smile than she deserved, turning his hand over in offering. She stared at it, defeated and tired.

"I need answers."

"No. You need wisdom. Which you've been displaying very little of, I might add."

She had the gall to scoff. "What do you know of wisdom?"

"It's how you've always beaten me before," he said, his lip quirking up unexpectedly. "Now, are you badly bruised anywhere else besides your pride? Or can we go on?"

She growled, batting his upturned hand away from where it was still hovering.

She led the way down the snaking path along the base of the Great Plateau until the cliffside opened to the southern plains of Central Hyrule, a tumble of soft greens and outcroppings shadowed by the Eastern Abbey and flanked by the Hylia River. The air grew warmer as they left the lake behind, filling with the soft, earthy scent of prairie grass, until, finally, glinting like beacons in the sunlight, the stone of the Outpost settlements rose up over the hillside in the distance.

She tensed as they walked, imagining the lives that wandered, defenseless and oblivious to the danger, within those walls. Images of the destruction in Taobab rose into her mind unbidden, and she picture mutilated, scorched bodies rising over the canyon instead of trees.

She closed her eyes, suppressing a shudder. They were flanked by settlements, making avoiding an intersection with her people impossible without significant backtracking; they would have to retreat across the Bridge of Hylia again, cross the Farosh Hills, and skirt the treacherous edge of the Dueling Peaks. It would take days—days she was sure the Calamity wouldn't give her.

Dread closed around her throat like the grip of a bony hand. Her pulse quickened and her feet shuffled to a stop. She wouldn't be able to defend them, not if he turned. He drew up beside her, and she stole a cautious glance at him; he was watching her with dark, amused eyes.

"Nervous?"

Her lips pressed into a thin, embittered line. "I don't expect you to understand."

"You don't give me enough credit," he tsked. "I understand perfectly. You're about to lead the Scourge of Hyrule right into the heart of civilization, knowing you couldn't save them from me if you tried. I don't envy you."

She turned her head so she wouldn't have to look at him, staring over the swathe of hillside towering over the riverbank. She didn't know if she wanted to shout, or scream, or run; her mind wandered to the day before, to the glazed, almost spellbound expression that had slipped over his features before he gave in to the urge to destroy the archway. Instinct, he had called it. It made her stomach knot. If destruction was so deeply ingrained in his nature, it hardly mattered what his intentions were.

He reached out, turning her back to face him again with cool, blistering fingers under her chin, searching her eyes. His touch jolted through her arms and down her spine, and his eyes, glacial, ribboned, seemed to leech whatever warmth was leftover out of her.

"Stop thinking about it," he told her, finally, dropping his hand, and she took a soft, tremulous breath in relief. "Panicking is not helping your cause."

Her teeth clicked shut. "I'm not panicking!"

"But you are afraid," he murmured, a displeased undercurrent in his voice. His gaze slid to the Outpost; he took a deep breath, like an animal scenting the air, and his mouth tugged down. "I can taste your fear."

Her body reacted to his words before her mind did, hair standing on end, blood quickening, as though it knew what sort of danger that meant for it. More instincts, swelling to the fore and reinforcing her misgivings about his.

"Couldn't we jump through?" she pleaded, trying not to sound desperate. "Like we did when you brought us to Lake Hylia?"

"I'd rather not," he frowned. "That could compromise both of us. I wouldn't risk it so close to a settlement."

"Is it really so hard for you?" she glared, as revolted as she was incredulous. "To _not_ destroy every living thing you come across?"

His eyes searched hers, just as incredulous, and arguably even more troubled. " _Yes_."

"All the more reason to use magic," she murmured, swallowing more doubt.

"Leaving your world intact is all about restraint. The more in control I am, the better—and exhausting myself with unnecessary teleporting every time you lose your nerve would jeopardize that. Is that what you want?"

She came dangerously close to sulking. "No."

"And this," he murmured, his hand reaching out slowly to touch her throat. His fingertips found her pulse, applying gentle pressure, and she was suddenly, acutely aware of it; the way it stammered and raced across his touch, sloshing and pounding against the pliant confines of her veins; how it must've felt to him, warm and titillating; what her fear must've tasted like. Her eyelids felt weighted as she listened, as she fixated on the sensation of his touch giving under the heavy, unending throb of her artery. He whispered, "This doesn't make it any easier, either."

In that moment she felt numb. If he had made to snap her neck, she wouldn't even have resisted. His touch was an anesthetic, cooling her blood, rendering her pliable and insensitive. All she knew was her pulse, throbbing in her ears and drumming against his fingers. Then he dropped his hand, and she could breathe again.

"Calm down," he insisted quietly, almost soothingly. "It will be fine."

He turned and started down the road again, leaving her trembling in his wake. She managed, before he got too far, "That's easier said than done."

He glanced back once, his lip quirking up crookedly. "Would it help if I gave you my word?"

"I don't know. I doubt it." She forced her feet forward, finally, falling in step with him, and glanced furtively at his profile. "Would you?"

"If you like."

She frowned, consumed with the arguable worth of his word, and the strangeness of his offer, and the disaster they were unflinchingly walking into.

"They won't recognize you," he said, and it was so unexpected she blinked.

"What?"

"Their princess just faced the Great Calamity in battle and went missing," he breathed. "We would draw too much attention. I've cast a glamour."

She glanced at the unchanged furl of hair draped over her shoulder, her dirty fingertips, felt at the familiar ridge of her nose. Nothing seemed different.

"It's only an illusion of obscurity," he clarified, his lip quirking in amusement. "The harder they look, the less interesting you'll seem. I couldn't bear to actually change your face; where would we be without those pretty green eyes of yours?"

She scoffed, glaring again, her fear suddenly forgotten in the rush of annoyance that followed, and he smirked. It wasn't until later on, when they were stepping over the boundary into the village, that it occurred to her that that may have been the point.

As promised, no one acknowledged them much as they skirted the edge of the settlement. Outside of the occasional polite nod, no one greeted them, and whenever someone looked long enough to discern who she was, the recognition would fade from their eyes and they abruptly lost interest. They hugged the east edge of the village; for all his talk of promises and precautions, he didn't seem eager to go through the heart of it, either.

"Why don't they feel you?" she murmured, her boots crunching on the dust and gravel as they traversed the road. "Shouldn't their instincts send them running?"

"Oh, they feel it," he mused, gesturing with his chin at the subtle frowns that would grace their expressions as they passed, the slightly wider berth they would unconsciously give him. "They just don't know enough to pinpoint it. The obscurity keeps them ignorant."

She chewed her lip, more interested than she should have been. 'Inappropriate' hardly began to describe hobnobbing with an evil tyrant over _spellcraft_ when he was posing an imminent threat to her people. But there was so much about magic she didn't understand, even despite her birthright, and the way he used it so easily was really quite fascinating.

"I don't understand you at all," she breathed, giving a passerby a soft smile at odds with her exasperated tone. "You're supposed to be this demon, this embodiment of evil and hatred—and I know you are. I can feel it. But you don't act on it."

He only shrugged. "I doubt you ever will."

"I might if you explained yourself, even a little."

She pursed her lips, waiting for a retort or some scrap of revelation. She sighed hotly when it became apparent he wasn't going to answer, and he smiled suddenly, a ribbon of white teeth peeking out from between his lips.

"That really eats you up, doesn't it?"

"That none of this makes any sense? That you insist on making me an accessory to whatever this is without the slightest explanation?" she snapped. "Yes, it does!"

"That's not it. You just don't like not having all the answers," he smirked. "I've already told where we're going and why. But that's not enough for you."

"That wouldn't be enough for any sane person."

"I'm helping you save your kingdom and bring about a golden age that will last an eternity. And you're put out that you can't quite pinpoint my motive."

"Greatly disturbed is more like it," she muttered, folding her arms stubbornly.

"Of all the things about me to find disturbing," he mused, smiling gently, and she couldn't find words to reply.

They reached the other side of the village without incident and headed for the river, following its winding edge north. He let her stop, twice, to rest on the bank, drink, and have a little to eat, and when she slipped on a slick rock as they were walking and tumbled into the shallow water, he'd laughed at her.

Before dusk, they reached the clutch of woods wedged between the Bottomless Swamp and the Hylia River. As her stamina was still relatively depleted, he chose to stop for the night there, and quickly set a fire and fixed her another dinner that he ordered her to eat.

She picked at the roasted fish and mushrooms tiredly, huddled against the warmth of the fire, and he watched her with his usual steely gaze.

"At the risk of sounding impudent, I have a request," she prompted, eyeing him over her skewer. He quirked a cynical brow, but said nothing, so she continued. "I'd like to fall asleep on my own tonight, if it's not too much trouble."

"You can try," he scoffed. "But I doubt you'll be able to. Your instincts are attuned to detect evil—to keep you alert in the presence of danger. It's hard to fall asleep when every nerve in your body is screaming at you to run."

"I've gotten pretty good at ignoring those signals recently," she pointed out. She expected him to scoff or smirk, but his mouth twisted into a frown.

"You shouldn't get complacent," he murmured. "You have those instincts for a reason."

She made a noncommittal sound in her throat, tossing her empty skewer into the flames, but when she looked back up he was gone. Then she felt his breath feathering the back of her neck and stiffened, every alarm in her body raised against his proximity.

"Don't think that because I haven't harmed you yet means that I can't, or that I won't," he murmured against her ear. The hair on the back of her neck rose at the promise in his voice, her heart thudding unevenly in her chest. "I am what I am. A monster. A demon. The Calamity. And you… you're just a girl, trying to wield a power you don't understand."

He stroked her face slowly, unexpectedly, with with the back of his knuckles, and she shuddered away from the touch. She raised her hand in a reflex to bat him away, but he grabbed her hand with his own instead, his fingers biting into her palm. She looked over her shoulder, startled, and met his eyes, sapphire and amber in the firelight.

"You cannot trust me," he echoed, running fingers that chilled and burned down the arch of her neck. Her eyes reflexively closed and her breath tremored out of her, the instinct to run knotting in her throat. She tried to pull her hand away, but his grip was like a vise.

"Let go," she said, her voice barely above a whisper as she tried to pull away again.

He didn't relent. He leaned in closer, his mouth hovering over her ear, and tears built in her throat. Her body was reacting as though death itself were touching her, refusing to let her go. " _Never_ let your guard down."

Hot tears spilled, unbidden, down her cheeks. That seemed to satisfy him, and he let her hand drop, standing and walking away from the ring of the fire into the night.

"Try to sleep, if you can," he called, growing more distant, and she didn't know if it was a taunt or not.

She pressed her mouth against her hand, swallowing a sob. She hated feeling this strange, morbid fear, whenever he wanted. It didn't make sense; in some ways he was more like a knight protector than he was like an enemy, always seeing to it that she had sufficient food, water, warmth, and rest. But, like turning the earth on its axis between night and day, he could change so quickly, making her skin crawl with the tone of his voice or his gentlest touch in spite of the fact that he had never actually gone so far as to harm her—even sparing the Outpost and everyone in it. She supposed it was as he had said: it was instincts, rooted deep in her mind and her body, that made her cower in his presence, that were meant to protect her from monsters like him.

Still, the shift was so drastic it made her feel like she was dealing with two separate people.

She wiped her tears away, irritated and exhausted, and curled up beside the fire. As he had predicted, sleep seemed incredibly far away. Eventually, though, as the fire began dying down, she started to drift off.

As she slipped under, an image rose to the surface of her consciousness like flotsam. It was only a blur at first; it eased gently into focus, sharpening each of her senses in tandem until it became as real and as vivid as any waking moment. And it was the most horrific thing she had ever seen.

Fire rained from the heavens, consuming the sky in burning embers and smoke. Every breath burned, and her eyes stung from the heat and ash. Whorls of black and amethyst seeped out of the ground around her, thick and foul and full of poison. The earth and the sky shook with sounds like thunder, mingling with white light and showers of blue sparks that never seemed to end.

The Calamity stood not far from her, a beacon of life and light in the chaos, wielding a blade that glowed with holy light in the darkness.

"Zelda, _now!_ "

She could feel it, the strain on her mind and her body as she struggled with something unseen and terrifying. She responded with a voice that was hers and yet not hers, familiar but strange, right yet wrong, like something she had forgotten once.

"I can't!" she cried, her voice drowned out by the commotion.

He made his way closer, arcing his blade through plumes of malice and fireballs that seemed intent on keeping them apart. He knelt near her, his eyes clear, and full of fire, and startlingly, pristinely blue. His voice was raised over the chaos, urgent and desperate. "What do you need?"

"I don't know—a container, a vessel—"

A single, orange eye opened out of the darkness, and she screamed as something vile and viscous hurtled towards them. He shielded her with his body, but then the sound of so many chains raking over each other flew around them, and something she couldn't quite make out—blue-eyed, spindly-legged, metallic—placed itself between them and absorbed the blow, exploding in a harsh flourish of azure lightning and harsh white light.

His eyes, so furious and blue, snapped back to hers as he shouted again over the turmoil. "What kind of container?"

"Something—something living, something I could tie it to—" she shook her head, hopelessly reaching for an answer. "Something strong enough to withstand the power of the gods—"

His eyes locked again with hers, and she saw reflected in them everything she felt must have shown in hers: heartache; hopelessness; fear.

And determination, resolute and unstoppable, that no darkness could ever hope to smother.


	4. Guidance

_A/N: Once again, thank you so so much to everyone who took the time to write a review! It makes my day when someone lets me know what they thought and it assures me that somewhere out there someone else is remotely interested in where this is going!_

 _I hope you guys enjoy this one! Let me know what you think! :)_

 _(Revisions made 11/2019)_

 **Guidance**

Zelda started awake to a warm, serene morning. Birdsong and sunlight filtered through the trees, and a gentle breeze off the river tousled the leaves. She breathed deeply, trying to calm her galloping heart. The dream had felt so incredibly _real_ …

She scanned the woods for the Calamity, but for now she was alone. She got to her feet and made her way to the river's edge, washing the grime from the road off her face and hands. Her reflection stared up at her, troubled, quivering and glistening in the current once the waters calmed. The image was bedraggled, with knotted hair and dirt-stained clothes.

"What have you gotten yourself into, Zelda?" she asked the reflection. It arched a slender brow at her, lobbing the question back.

She sighed, tracing her thoughts upstream and lingering over the details of her dream. So little of it had made sense. The sword the Calamity had been wielding was unmistakably the Blade of Evil's Bane—which was impossible, because nothing evil could ever touch it and survive. So many of the sounds and lights were unfamiliar, decidedly _unnatural_ , like nothing she had ever heard before, and she wasn't sure how her mind could've conjured such things. He had been different, too. His eyes had been wholly, pristinely blue, untainted by the brilliant orange coils she was used to…

Then she saw them, staring up at her from the water, and spun.

"You startled me," she said, breathless.

He didn't smile, all trace of yesterday's jesting mood unaccountably missing. "There's a crossing ahead. We'll take the east road, and reach the edge of the Lost Woods by nightfall. I trust you won't object this time around?"

She nodded, unnerved by his icy demeanor.

"Good," he muttered. "We'll reach the Sword tomorrow and be done with this."

She got to her feet wordlessly and followed as he stalked back into the forest, uneasy. Whatever progress she had made with him the day before seemed to have reverted overnight, and if his expression was any indication, things may have gotten worse. They foraged a breakfast for her as they moved north of wildberries, tree nuts, and mushrooms, and crossed the Rebonae Bridge within the hour.

Through the course of the morning it became apparent that his mood had soured even more than she'd feared. She was never able to move fast enough for him, often earning an impatient growl to keep pace. The less forgiving terrain through the Crenel Hills made appeasing him especially difficult, and when he finally let her take a rest near the Thims crossing, she all but collapsed on the riverbank.

Bitterness rose in her throat as she knelt to drink, feeling battered beyond recognition. His impatience with her, his sudden unwillingness to speak except to punish her, set her on edge, and she swallowed frustrated tears along with the cool river water. She wiped the back of her hand against her mouth when she had finished, panting. Her reflection stared broodingly back at her on the trembling surface.

Hatred. That's what had colored his every glance, his every gesture and cutting remark over the course of the morning. Only she didn't know if it was welling up from somewhere deep within him, inseparable from his personality, or if she had done something to earn it. She glanced cautiously in his direction; he was standing on the bridge with his back to her, staring north towards the swollen shape of the forest canopy rising ponderously on the horizon.

And she was suddenly struck with the oddest feeling that they had been here together before.

"That's enough," he called when she had barely caught her breath, and she sighed as she heaved herself back onto her shaking legs, too proud to complain.

They made their way up Trilby Plain in the heat of the noon hour, and her exhaustion started catching up with her. Her legs trembled beneath her with every step, and more than once uneven footing made her stumble. They gave out on her completely once as the muscles buckled with a change in the slope, bringing her to her knees, and she was about to lift herself up when he did it for her.

A surprised cry left her throat as he grabbed her forearm and heaved her to her feet.

"Let me go," she demanded, his fingers biting painfully beneath her wrist.

" _Stop_ slowing me down," he growled, and she winced when his grip tightened reflexively with his words.

"I'm going as fast as I can," she tried to bite back, but it came out too weak to resemble anything close to fighting words. "You're being unreasonable!"

"And you're being pathetic," he hissed, pulling her closer as he glowered. "You're _weak,_ undisciplined, wielding your power around aimlessly like a child!"

"Stop," she gasped quietly, trying to pry his hand off her arm as the discomfort increased, flaring into pain.

"I should just kill you now," he sneered. "You'd be reborn as someone more worthy, and I wouldn't have to put up with your incompetence!"

"You're hurting me," she warbled, tears stinging her eyes from the pain and his unaccountable hate.

He let her go and she turned, hiding her face behind the curtain of her hair as she cradled her wrist. She heard his irritated sigh and his steps crunching on the road, growing more distant, and she slowly made to follow, her throat burning. The pain in her arm gradually dulled to a dull throb, aching when her steps jostled it but tolerable otherwise. It was the sting from his insults that lingered, pricking her confidence. Just yesterday he had told her not to doubt her power or her destiny on account of her failure to contain him.

Less than a day later, and he'd already found other reasons sufficient to discredit her.

She trailed him in tense silence, the distance between them stretching for long intervals as he regularly left her behind without acknowledging her slowness. He let her drink from the river once more when the road forked, and then they followed the road up into the Minshi Woods, the threshold that arched along the Eldin Foothills into the Lost Woods. Thick sunbeams refracted through the gnarled branches, filling the forest with rich orange light, and the Calamity finally slowed, moving over the delicate silence of the wood without disturbing the underbrush as though it were second nature.

They reached the mouth of the Lost Woods just before sunset. The canopy and the enchantment of the fog were so dense the brilliant veins of sunlight splitting the horizon were barely visible. Ancient stone archways, half-eaten by time and vines, marked the inconspicuous boundary where the magic began, and he ignited a flickering spark near them with a gesture to throw bracken on.

Zelda settled next to it wordlessly, watching him work. Few passersby were foolhardy enough to venture into the forest's enchantment, so there were plenty of fallen branches suitable for firewood scattered nearby. Only Hylian Knights were taught the secret of navigating the magic by the royal family. There hadn't been one among them that could draw the sword the mist protected.

When the fire was healthily ablaze, he left her to trap an animal for her supper, and returned as the twilight was bleeding into dusk with flayed and skewered hare—already dead, she noted with some relief. He didn't speak as he set it roasting for her, but his silence seemed more preoccupied than it did hateful. She was too tired to be invested in the change, which was negligible. Not having eaten since breakfast, and having been forced to march at a demanding pace for most of the day, she found herself disinclined to waste much energy on him at all.

He handed her the spit when the meat was cooked through, and she balanced it across her knees, picking at it idly with her good hand. She kept the other tucked in her lap while she ate; it was still aching and sent pain shooting up her arm whenever she tried to flex her fingers. She finished the meal off quickly, ravenous as she was, and tossed the skewer into the flames. For the briefest moment she locked eyes with him; she had carelessly let her gaze wander and noticed how intently he was watching her, reacting without thinking. She immediately fixated on the fire again, hoping he would lose interest. But the damage was already done. She could feel him eyeing her in the firelight, and her pulsed throbbed unpleasantly.

"How badly did I hurt you?"

She didn't answer, stubbornly drawing her arm further into her lap without meeting his gaze. The last thing she wanted was to give him further reason to think her weak. But when he rose from his seat and knelt beside her, cradling her arm in his hands by the elbow and wrist, she didn't fight him, afraid that resisting would exacerbate the soreness. He drew it off her lap slowly, studying the bruise blossoming across her skin in the firelight. He traced the discoloration with his fingertips, and she held her breath; and then, gently, slowly, he felt up the length of her forearm, mending bone and ligament as he went, and the pain evaporated with it. His hand closed around hers, his fingers pressing softly into her palm as he stitched up the last of the damage.

"You should've said something."

She swallowed, slowly meeting his vibrant, warring eyes. She couldn't formulate her thoughts; her mind snagged on bits of a bitter retort, thanks, questions, dredging up nothing useful. The dream drifted back into her mind's eye, when he had looked at her with similar concern out of radiant, untainted blue eyes.

Finally, she muttered, "I was too proud."

He watched her, eyes clouded with thought, and his frown deepened. "Do you not know how to heal?"

"My mother died when I was young. My training was very basic."

"Only the sealing?"

She nodded minutely, a little ashamed to admit it. He released her hand, finally, and unfastened his right gauntlet. Then he reached for the small knife on his belt and dragged the blade across the ridge of his exposed palm, leaving a welling trail of red in its wake. He offered it to her, and she took it cautiously in both hands, too surprised to question it.

"I don't know how—"

"Just try," he murmured. "It's like unspooling thread."

Her brow furrowed at the odd metaphor as she cradled his injured hand in hers, lifting her fingers to trace the wound. She ran them slowly along the edge, channeling power into her fingertips, but it didn't want to go anywhere, lingering directionless under her skin.

"You haven't learned elements either," he guessed, and she pursed her lips, keeping her focus fixed on the task at hand. He sighed, shifting without jostling her work. "I should've started teaching you sooner."

She had mimicked his movements three times, but nothing was happening. She let her eyes flicker up to his, briefly, before making a fourth attempt. "What do you mean?"

"I won't be traveling with you after tomorrow. You don't even know how to light your own fires. Heaven forbid you should sprain your ankle or break a bone." He stilled her wrist with his good hand, correcting the bend of her knuckles carefully. "Like unspooling thread."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"Stop overthinking it. Let your power work for you."

She took a breath, refocusing her energy and trying again, forcing her reservations beneath the surface and opening her mind to the possibility. Eventually she felt it, tentative, just a trickle, flowing through her fingertips and tapping into her power, tugging downward in a small stream like a single, slender cord, unraveling out of her like…

"It is like unspooling thread," she murmured, watching the wound begin to mend. It was slow going, the pull on the phantom spool spanning her knuckles fluctuating sporadically between taut and slack as she tried to find a rhythm. The flesh knitted under her touch, weaving evenly in time with the unraveling sensation. She closed his fingers over his palm when she was done, holding his hand closed while she searched for words. "After tomorrow. You mean after you're destroyed."

"Have you decided to believe me about that?"

"I suppose."

His eyes scanned her face in the firelight, guarded. He reached his hand back silently and slid it into the fire, bringing it back holding a tongue of shuddering flame. She stared as he took her wrist and laid the fire gently in her palm, watching the exchange apprehensively. When he was satisfied he pulled his hands away, letting her hold it alone. It licked just above her palm, flickering hungrily in all directions as it sought something to consume.

"Feed it a little," he instructed quietly as it began to dwindle, and she did her best to obey, channeling her own warmth towards it. The flame lapped at her energy, renewing off the sustenance she offered. Then he murmured, "Yes. After I'm destroyed."

Her concentration faltered and the flicker suddenly went out. She expected him to growl at her ineptitude, but instead he wordlessly took her right hand again with his, palm up, and guided her towards the fire. She got to her knees beside him, letting his hand under hers take them into the dancing flames. The heat and the light glided over her skin like silk, floating instead of devouring as his magic kept it from burning them.

"Take some," he directed, his voice soft against her ear, and as it coalesced above her palm he withdrew their hands. He let go slowly once she had a handle on it, observing, and shook his head once, incredulous. "The bearer of the power of the gods, the strongest magic in all Hyrule—holding fire for the first time."

"No one thought it would be me," she whispered distantly, watching the fire dwindle and flare in her palm as she experimented with withdrawing her warmth and then shunting it back again. "My mother's death was unexpected. We all thought…" She pursed her lips, cradling the little flame closer to herself. "No one thought it would be me."

They were silent for a while, listening to the hollow winds shifting through the mist at their backs, embers eating through dry twigs, and the subtle breath of the flame she was nursing. At length, he mused, his eyes draped in shadow and colorless, "Including you."

She met his eyes, startled. "Of course including me. I was only six years old."

"I didn't think you would be so… inexperienced." He sighed, troubled. "This could complicate things."

She stared, her face drawn with worry in the firelight. "How so?"

"Put that out and try making your own. Create the warmth, and then a spark."

She frowned as he sidestepped the question, but complied, closing her hand and letting it go cold, smothering the flame. She started channeling the warmth, and blindly willed her power to spark. Her palm was dark except for the spattering firelight. "Nothing's happening."

"Try again."

"But how do I—"

"Stop overanalyzing. Stop thinking that you can't."

"It isn't that simple," she countered, frustrated. "How can I do something if I don't even know—"

His hands closed around her wrists, suddenly, and she gasped as power surged through her veins. It coursed through her body, limitless, intense, luminous, pulsating in time with her heartbeat. Her eyes closed reflexively and her head lolled, and she sighed, reveling in the strange sensation.

"The power of the gods is in you," he murmured. "Harness it. Stop fearing it. Stop doubting that you're worthy of it."

It was a reservoir, endless, a wellspring bubbling up from some deep, untapped place rooted deep in her being. The power wasn't unfamiliar; she had called on it more times than she could count, training to confront him. But he was right. She did fear it. She never simply let it exist in her, fill her, as it was now. She had always considered herself a vessel, a channel through which that power could manifest itself when Hyrule needed it. But now, luxuriating in it, conducting it through herself, the roles seemed reversed: the _power_ was a channel, at her disposal to use as she pleased.

"Light the spark."

Fire erupted from both her hands, devouring her warmth. He let go of her wrists, but she hardly registered the change. She was entranced by her own power, by this tiny, insignificant expression of it. Fire spiraled upwards in a quivering shaft until it was above the trees; it circled her in tortuous rings; she ground it under her fingers into a tame, glowing ember that cast soft light over the night; it balanced, shackled, on the edge of her fingertip, and then burst to life again when she breathed on it.

And he watched, with dark eyes, from across the flames.

It was well into the night when she spared him another thought. She was lying on her back, staring up at thousand glistening stars blinking like jewels floating across an inky sea. She rolled a silky fireball back and forth across her knuckles, playing mindlessly.

"You said I complicated things," she prompted, not bothering to look at him. Maybe it was the power, the headiness of it, that made her less inhibited. "My inexperience. What did you mean?"

"I'm going to need your power," he murmured. "Destroying a curse as old and as powerful as I am isn't easy. I was counting on your skills being more refined than they are, but you have the strength. We'll make do."

"Was she much stronger than I am? My predecessor, I mean."

"She was very powerful."

"But you managed to kill her." He didn't respond, and she pursed her lips, thinking. "Did I disappoint you? You were so angry, and I didn't understand it. Was that why? Because I'm not enough like her?"

"No," he said, and she turned at the surprise in his voice, meeting his vivid, two-toned eyes. "It's because you're too much like her."

She turned back to the stars. They glittered dazzlingly in the night sky, stretched across the heavens like teardrops. "What happened to you, 10,000 years ago? After so many eons, why are you trying to end yourself?"

He leaned over her from above, his face drifting upside down into her vision.

"Do you know what happens when you start asking about things that don't concern you?"

"You put me to sleep."

He hummed in agreement, running a cool fingertip up the bridge of her nose and across her forehead.

The darkness tumbled over her before his touch reached her hairline.

She drifted through the black into another vision. Sunlight trickled through shuddering leaves and blossoms caught on the wind's breath, flickering in spangled starbursts beneath verdant green veils. The light played on her eyelids with shadows, fluttering over each other while birdsong carried between the pristine stone pillars and the trees from around the sanctuary. She inhaled deep of the warm air, opening her eyes to watch the pale pink petals weave lazily through the sunbeams.

It was like paradise. But when she spoke, in the voice that was hers and not hers, there was an underlying sadness in her words that no amount of paradise could remove.

"Do you ever wonder what you'll do… afterward?"

The Calamity was sprawled on the grass beside her, catnapping beneath oaks and dogwoods. A broadsword in a blue scabbard etched with gold overlay rested near his head, discarded like something forgotten amidst the tranquility. A bird trilled another complex refrain, long and lilting; he opened a single, curious blue eye, and cast it inquiringly in her direction.

"When this is all over, I mean."

He closed it again, folding his arm comfortably behind his head.

"A little."

She braided two blades of grass together between lithe fingers, quietly working up the boldness to press the issue. "Only a little?"

"I'll serve Hyrule wherever she'll have me. There are only a few things I want for myself." He paused, and then shifted onto his side, searching her face, and amended, "Just one thing."

"What would that be?"

She was watching her fingers turn the grass over in her lap, but he didn't answer until she met his eyes; they glinted in the light, touched by the ghost of a smile.

"I think you know."

She smiled, her pulse flying, and her gaze flitted back to the grass in her hands. "Have you heard about Maz's latest invention?"

"Another Beast?"

"No. A new kind of Shrine that uses stasis field tech to heal on a cellular level. It's just a prototype, but he says it's powerful enough to bring someone back from the dead."

"Sounds unnatural," he muttered. "Not even you can do that."

"No," she agreed. Then she tiled her head, considering. "Not that I've had much opportunity to try. Maybe I just need a little practice."

"Maybe," he allowed. "All you need is a willing victim."

She smirked at his nonchalance. It was a ridiculous notion; resurrection was well beyond her abilities, even with the power of the gods at her disposal. "Wherever will I find one of those?"

"I wouldn't mind dying in your arms."

She went to scoff at him, but her throat knotted when she met his eyes. They were depthless, weighed down by the burden they both tried their best to ignore and the disquieting truth that there may not be an 'afterward.' And she knew, tethered to his gaze, pristinely blue and unending, that he meant it.


	5. Lost

_A/N: Wow, this monster of a chapter is FINISHED! Sorry it took so long! It's a whopping 7,000 words though, so I hope that makes up for it! Thank you so, SO much to the awesome people that reviewed, mwah! You are awesome! And a big thank you to Lortenian, for editing THAT scene for me, and getting me over the hump to get this chapter out!_

 _Also, I started a tumblr where you can keep track of my progress between updates, if anyone is interested: embyrinitalics dot tumblr dot com_

 _Thanks for reading! Leave a review, if you're moved to do so, I would love it!_

 _(EDIT: Edited on 5/10/2019 because no story should have that many adjectives, ever T_T)_

 **Lost**

Dawn was painting the sky in strokes of pale sea foam and powder blue that stretched south across the rise of the hills, smearing pigment into a morning that was otherwise devoid of color. It was cold and silent beyond what one would naturally expect of the hour, and it seemed to her, as her consciousness trickled back from one realm into another, that the forest's eerie enchantment must have been seeping out into the rest of the world.

The Calamity was standing at the imperceptible line of the magic, so close that his breath was crossing the boundary into it, and the mist, rising out of the earth in great whorls, was licking at him hungrily.

He looked like something out of a dream: an endless, forbidding forest sprawling before him; the dull green of his tunic a lone beacon of color in the mist and the overhang that was so thick it blocked out the light; and somewhere beyond the ancient, impassable magic, the key to his own destruction was waiting, enshrined in a pedestal most of the world had forgotten.

"Have you been into these woods before?"

She blinked. His voice, pensive, unexpected, broke the spell she had fallen into somewhere on the journey between her dreams and consciousness.

"Yes. Once. With an escort of knights."

"Don't expect them to be as docile as they were then."

She hadn't thought them docile at all; the mist had constantly crept in on their path, threatening to steal the outliers away and condemn them to wander, lost, forever, beneath the sagging, gnarled boughs of the trees. Legend said they took the faces of the lost, wearing their contorted, mindless expressions as a warning to intruders—or to torment the ones who wouldn't turn back.

But he was an ancient, prolific magic-wielder, and she the heiress of the sealing power of the gods—there were few things in the world that could possibly get the better of them. She got up from the floor of dewy grass and moss and joined him beside the edge of the enchantment, dipping into the barrier with her fingertips and watching the mist lap ravenously where she touched.

"I'm sure we'll manage," she muttered.

The Calamity turned his piercing eyes on her, studying her with an expression that was puzzled and amused at once. Finally, he said, "Do you not know fear?"

"I do," she frowned, defensive. "I fear you."

"Do you?"

Her gaze locked with his again, blue and orange mingling with sea green. The question was genuine, hanging between them with uncomfortable weight, his expression stony and unreadable. There was an underlying accusation in his tone that she didn't miss, and it made words lodge in her throat like stones.

"Not nearly enough," he finally decided, his mouth tugging down as he turned his attention back to the mist. He sighed. "The Woods will see to that."

And then he took a purposeful step into the mist and was swallowed whole.

She stood at the boundary for a moment, torn and harboring sudden doubt. She couldn't see him at all through the fog, though she knew he could only be a few feet away at most. The mist had descended between them like the froth of breaking waves. As always, the road behind her, unobstructed, beckoning, invited her to turn and run. But she knew that would get her nowhere. So she exhaled and stepped over the line.

The world glowed subtly on the other side and was unnaturally still, as though suspended in a moment in time and awash in cool moonlight. Even the forest she had left behind, sitting sleepily beyond the boundary, seemed shrouded in a dream from this end. He was waiting for her, standing motionless as stone in the mist between two unlit torches.

Her skin prickled. It was too still, too quiet. It felt lifeless. Nothing stirred, nothing slipped under bracken, or rustled leaves, nothing breathed.

Not even the wind.

"We have to go back," she whispered.

"We can't."

Panic rose steadily in her chest like tidewaters. She took a step backward, and then another, reaching blindly behind her for the edge she had only just crossed. But it was gone. He turned, closing his hand firmly over her wrist before she could drift too far away.

"If we get separated, it will take me hours to find you again," he growled. "Get ahold of yourself."

"The only way through these woods is by navigating the currents in the wind," she recounted tautly, holding on to the last fraying bits of her patience like a lifeline. "We'll never find the path without them."

"Do you think it's coincidence that the winds that have guided your people for thousands of years are suddenly missing?" He dropped her hand, frustration evident in his dark expression. "It's the Deku Tree. He's hidden the path."

"From you?"

"And you with me," he murmured, arching a slender brow. He turned back to the moonlit wood. Mist rippled beneath the boughs, over the moss and bracken, over their skin, obscuring the night and revealing pathways that vanished again just as quickly as they'd appeared. "Stay close. If the enchantment takes hold of you, you won't be able to tell the canopy from the floor."

"I know," she breathed. She could feel the magic responsible for the phantasms and trickery permeating the air, tasting of herbs and citrus on her tongue. "They're called the Lost Woods for a reason."

"That's not why," he said, moving slowly from their place at the boundary that skirted uselessly out of their reach. "It's because you'll lose yourself here."

She fell in step behind him without thinking, drawn forward as though tethered to him. The trees seemed to shift as they walked, swelling and distorting on the edge of their vision. The rot in the boles left crooked, jagged sheaths and gaping holes: the stolen faces. They watched them as they passed out of hollow eyes, looming, silently, like something alive.

"It shows you truth, or your greatest fear. They're one and the same for most people." He ducked under a low hanging branch, bracing himself against the bulging trunk and tracking forward cautiously. "Confronted with that, with no way out, your mind would rather be lost."

"Surviving it must take courage," she mused absently, thinking of the reward that lay past it, and he peered over his shoulder and met her eyes, searching for something in them beyond the moonglow and the mist.

He admitted, quietly, "Courage helps."

She followed him wordlessly after that, weaving carefully in his tracks. Once or twice, out of the cover of the mist, the sound of a child's laughter echoed distantly, but he didn't seem to hear it. Sometimes she thought he was hearing other things that she couldn't, hesitating for no apparent reason, or tilting his head towards some phantom sound that never graced her ears.

The woods grew more shapeless and illusory the farther in they ventured. Sometimes the trees dispersed, leaving them in an empty grove where the isolated oaks towered overhead, immense and immeasurable, and the sensation of loneliness breathed down their necks; sometimes they closed in, the branches splaying and knitting above. The woods whispered her name; they illuminated a gentle, winding path with warm sunlight that she knew would inevitably lead nowhere; they plagued her with the feeling that she had seen all those exact trees a hundred times before.

The Calamity kept his palms spread down at he led the way, scenting a path with his hands. She nearly thought of asking him to teach her the method, just so she would have something else to think of besides the illusions barraging her senses, but she was afraid of distracting him. In the distance, the shadow of a woman's figure glided between the silhouettes of the trees and the spangles floating in the mist.

Zelda breathed deeply, trying to block it out. She told herself to focus on what was real, but it was becoming harder and harder to tell the difference. The woman stalked her from the shadow of an oak, her features obscured in darkness, so close she could've reached out and touched her.

It was nothing like the pilgrimage she had taken to the pedestal. Back then, surrounded by her knights, a guiding wind, and so many torches, the woods had been ominous, but the forces that made them so were always kept at bay, just outside the circle of their company. Now she was in the thick of it, subject to all of the temptations and duplicity the mist had to offer. She could only trust that the Calamity knew the way.

 _Trust_. Her mind snagged unpleasantly on the thought. How many times had he warned her, in no uncertain terms, that she could never trust him?

Suddenly, he was gone, and the woman was standing in his place.

Zelda studied her a moment, forgetting to blink her away. She was beautiful, her long, golden tresses falling in loose curls over her shoulders. Her form was willowy, elegant, and her eyes, vibrant and piercing, were a lovely shade of blue, as pure and bright as the summer sky.

"You're killing him," she whispered, her soft, familiar voice tainted with accusation and hurt.

Then she was gone.

And Zelda was alone.

Her heart thudded in her chest as her eyes scanned the woods for him, for someone, for anything that was genuine. But she couldn't be sure of any of it. The woods, labyrinthine, glowing, sprawled endlessly in all directions. She dithered, trying to decide if it was best to stay where she was and hope he could find her, or if she should keep going forward and hope she found him.

The woods whispered her name again, a chorus of unearthly voices sounding behind her in a staggered echo, and she moved, too unnerved to stand there and do nothing.

The ground toyed with her, hiding raised roots and slopes from her vision until she was stumbling over them, and the whispers followed wherever she went, fraying her nerves. The woods seemed to go on forever, churning by in a series of repetitious trees and knolls that all looked exactly alike, undermining her sense of direction and her confidence at once. She finally stopped and closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm. When she opened them, the woman was standing with her again.

She had her back turned to her, and when she spoke, Zelda knew where she had heard her voice before. It was the voice she used in her dreams, rising out of memories that belonged to someone else, the voice that was hers and not hers.

"Don't make the same mistakes I did," she murmured, turning her face until the glow of the woods splashed against her profile. Her cheek was wet with tears. "Don't let him die."

The forest tilted in her vision, and she blinked, trying to regain her equilibrium. The woman was gone. The whispers started again, so close and so unexpected that she spun around. There was nothing. When she turned back, the woods had shifted, and she froze, scanning for something that looked even slightly familiar. But it was no use; she was thoroughly disoriented.

Barely able to tell the canopy from the floor.

She closed her eyes again, breathing deep to stave off the panic.

"Courage," she reminded herself quietly. "It's not a trap. It's a test."

She opened her eyes. The moonglow had dimmed, turning the mist black and swallowing the trees. She felt a presence in the dark, cold, malevolent, like a storm brooding on the edge of her consciousness. The flesh on her skin rose, and she spun, looking for the source. Shrouded in the darkness, illuminated by threads of pale light, the Calamity stood with his back turned.

She stumbled forward, too relieved to question the reality of him. When she reached out to touch him he vanished, splintering into a thousand particles and dissipating into the mist. He reformed just behind her, standing so close she could feel his breath skimming across the nape of her neck. She whirled, and he caught both her wrists in his hands.

His eyes came up to meet hers, and she flinched at the way they burned: one fluorescent as blue fire, the other molten as ore smelting in a foundry.

"You're so breakable," he murmured.

The familiar heat of a conjuring seeped out of his hands, traveling up her wrists, over her arms, up her neck. Then he let go, and her hands snapped down at her sides, so forcefully that she cried out in surprise, paralyzed by his magic. Her heart sputtered and her breath turned shallow as she was swallowed by the chilling sensation of her own helplessness, and he paced a slow circle, watching her reaction dispassionately.

She kept her narrowed eyes fixed on the illusion of him as he moved, but he stopped just behind her, outside her line of vision. His fingers traced her spine where it met her skull, and she shuddered against his touch, too warm and too cool, and so gentle, as though he were stroking something made of glass.

"Such weak defenses. A clean break here would kill you almost instantly," he mused, and then trailed his fingers down her backbone, brushing along the ridges through her clothes, until they came to rest on the small of her back. "Or here, if I wanted to cripple you."

Her mouth went dry at the threat. Her blood pounded in her ears at his blithe demeanor, every instinct urging her to scream, or run. But she couldn't move. He circled her again, watching her with renewed interest, and dread coiled in her throat at the fire in his eyes. She felt it, like a cold caress on her skin, or the kiss of a blade's edge on her neck: he was hunting, and she was prey.

"Slicing the skin here would bleed you out slowly," he went on, running icy fingers across her paralyzed wrist. Then he raised his hand to her throat, stroking the hollow of it. His fingertips lingered, his eyes sliding haltingly from the contact there to her eyes. "Or here, if I wanted to do it more quickly."

He vanished again, atomizing and suspending for an unreal instant before melting into the dark.

"Shall we try it?"

A blade lodged between the bones in the small of her back and she screamed, the sound echoing eerily through the silence of the woods. The pain only lasted for an instant, the magic falling away as he slowly pulled it out, and everything from her waist down collapsed, numb.

She gasped where she fell, panicked and vision swimming. He knelt beside her, watching her reaction again, but she was beyond feeling shame; her chest heaved as she tried to draw breath, small, choked sounds breaking in her throat with every gasp. Tears finally spilled from her eyes. She no longer knew the woods or the tests, the nature of the visions or the difference between what she saw and felt and what she knew was real. She only knew the horror of a fractured body, the numbness, and the senseless fear of what he could do to her now.

He took her forearm gently, and his chilling touch startled her into fighting back. She pulled, lurching away with the half of her body that wasn't broken, but it was a futile effort. His grip was like iron.

He held her wrist between them, watching her eyes, and dragged the blade of his dagger across the soft flesh with deliberate slowness. The pain was dulled by her adrenaline, but an awful sound still grated out of her throat, and his eyes gleamed as he reveled in it. He dropped her arm when her suffering ceased to amuse him; it landed beside her head, and she watched the laceration ooze and pulse with the beat of her pounding heart. His voice filled her ears again, thrusting her under the surge of her dread as easily as he would've held her underwater.

"Finishing you won't be difficult," he mused, the dagger near her face, catching the sparse light on its edge and drawing her eyes. "But that's the trouble, princess. I only get to kill you once. How do I make your death last?"

Something cold trailed over her lip, down her throat, down the seam of her body, but she couldn't tell if the touch was his or the touch of a blade.

Then the knife bit into her body again, sinking through her heart or a lung, and the world spun. Pain turned her vision white, and her heart thudded louder as her senses drained away, as she spiraled towards death. The fear drained, too, filling her with clarity that orbited a single notion: that she had made a terrible mistake.

Her knees hit the ground and she gasped, forcing air back into her lungs as she teetered unsteadily back to life. The forest had returned to itself, bathed in pale light and shifting mist, and the woman was kneeling with her.

"Leave me alone!" she snapped, her nerves threadbare from the torture she had just endured.

"You have to save him," she urged. "You're the only one who can."

"Him?" she panted, turning frantic. "The Calamity? That _monster_?"

"You know what he is! How do you think he means to draw the Sword?" She pressed her lips together impatiently, averting her eyes. Then she whispered, "It's your fault he's a monster."

The grass beneath them blanched white, dissolving into ash beneath her hands, and the effect spread, expanding radially from where they knelt. Soon it touched the trees, the vines, the stones, sapping the forest colorless and reducing it to chalky dust. Zelda stood and turned to run, going as fast as her trembling legs could take her. She didn't make it far before the woman cut her off, stalking out from behind a lonely tree directly into her trajectory and locking eyes with her.

She sighed breathlessly, resigned, and color slowly leached back into the world. She could see some resemblance, now that she looked; they had a similar brow, and they shared a sweep of jawbone that her mother had, and her mother before her. The woman's lips were fuller, her eyes were jewel-tone blue, and her lissome build made her seem untouchable; but beyond those differences, she saw the inherent similarity the Calamity had seen.

"What do you expect me to do?" Zelda finally demanded. "How can I help what he is?"

"The answer was at Thyphlo, and if you kill him now, then he will truly be lost," she said, her voice thinning, vanishing into the air like the memory of a whisper. She was disappearing with it, disintegrating into the mist, and then she followed it completely, leaving one word behind: "Murderer."

A raindrop, startling, viscous, dropped onto her cheekbone, and she flinched away, brushing it off with the back of her hand.

It smeared red across her knuckles.

She raised her eyes upwards and met his, listless, colorless, staring vacantly. He was strung up, graying and lifeless, in a tangle of vines, swaying inverted in the air above her. One of his arms had come loose, hanging down as though he were reaching for her, and blood was dripping rhythmically off his fingers. The drops fell on her brow, her cheek, her lip.

But she couldn't move, or even look away.

Sunlight glared across her vision, melting the illusion into oblivion and sending the mist spiraling away, and she spun, shielding her eyes. The light carved a passageway through the mist, and standing at the other end of it, his hand outstretched and his eyes lit with a blaze of power, was the Calamity. She ran towards him in the moment of clarity he afforded her, forcing herself forward even as the mist tumbled back over the path like crashing waves. The fog clouded her vision, obscuring him, but she ran on blindly, fixated on where he had been.

She barreled headlong into him, reflexively fisting her hands in the fabric of his tunic in case the forest tried to separate them again. She panted, staring into his throat as she waited for the adrenaline to run its course. His hands closed on her shoulders as the mist closed around them, and she finally looked into his eyes.

Not glowing and mismatched. Not ashen and lifeless. Just the amalgam of sapphire and amber she was used to, searching hers—probably for signs of sanity. Her breath shuddered out of her in relief.

"I don't have as much courage as I thought," she whispered.

He took a shallow breath, leaning closer, but then thought better of his reply. He said instead, softly, his voice taut, "Neither do I."

He took her hand without another word, linking his fingers firmly in hers, and turned again, leading her determinedly through the web of enchantment.

Progress was slower this time; he seemed more cautious, or perhaps less certain.

After he brought them to a stop for a third time, she asked, "What is it?"

"It's more difficult with one hand," he murmured, but his grip on her hand didn't slacken, and she wasn't about to recommend that he let go.

"Teach me," she suggested, hoping he would allow it. She would've done anything to get out of that forest.

He passed her a disapproving glance, but then surprised her by complying.

"You can feel the threads of the enchantment weaved over this place," he began, taking another step as he ascertained the direction. "They're stronger where they're shielding the path. Give me your hand."

She offered it cautiously, and he turned, bringing his own palm to hover beneath hers. Power, invisible, tenuous, pulsed out of it, and she could feel it pass over her skin, delicate as the beat of a butterfly's wing.

"That's what you're looking for," he murmured, turning his attention back to the woods. "But this magic is old and well-crafted, and it's everywhere. The differences will be subtle."

She nodded and let her hand fall facedown. She couldn't increase his acuity as he could have if he had both his hands, but she could offer a second opinion, and she was happy to have something to busy her mind with besides the labyrinth they were trapped in and what it had shown her. She let him lead, experimentally feeling for the gradation between the magic cloaking the path they were on and the magic that hung elsewhere. It was subtle. But when they came to a juncture, the rise of the power bending to the left, he looked at her for confirmation, and when she nodded he followed it without hesitating.

The forest contorted, entrapping them as long as it was able. But finally, after a thousand questioning glances and a thousand answering gestures, the Calamity raised his eyes and focused on a break in the mist.

"There," he said, moving towards it without letting her go.

The barren floor of the maze dipped and gave way to the edge of a lush gully, hidden by the thick blanket of the mist. It clung to them as they stepped into the fern-laden path, as though trying to pull them back, but thinned and vanished in the heat of the sunlight. Birdsong lilted in the distance, and the lively green underbrush grew more verdant as their eyes adjusted to the light, and once he was certain the danger had passed, he dropped her hand.

The canopy above them was lush, filtering the sunlight in blinding spangles that shifted with the wind. Gradually, like the sands of the desert giving way to a bank of stone, the leaves above them dotted with blossoms, until they were under nothing but blossoms. The sunlight poured brighter through the gentle film of the petals, dousing the gully in warm, pink-hued light. A breeze pulled at them, cool and refreshing and tasting of an ancient power, and rising silently, untouchably, out of the earth, a medallion of worn stone eaten by forest, its centered pedestal, and the blade plunged immovably into it rested in the grove like an old, forgotten memory.

For a moment she was overcome, struck by the juxtaposition of the horrors in the woods with all the courage that sword represented. It felt unmistakably divine, and she felt unworthy to even approach.

The Calamity had no such qualms. He marched on the pedestal, showing it as much deference as a well-trodden staircase. Zelda swallowed an angry rebuke, moving to follow. Then a resonant, booming voice filled the wood, reverberating through her ribs, and her eyes swept up the sprawl of ancient roots and the gnarled bole rising behind the pedestal, settling on the ageless, omniscient eyes of the Great Deku Tree.

"So. You survived."

The Calamity scoffed. "Don't sound so surprised."

Zelda glared at him, mortified, but the deity was unfazed by his lack of respect.

"You have come for the Sword," the tree mulled, the smooth knots that were his eyes shifting slowly beneath awnings of dense bark. They settled on the lonely blade, passionless and filtering through the knowledge of forgotten ages. "If you mean to end the cycle, I must caution you that the task before you is an arduous one."

"But it will work?" he pressed.

"If you have the strength," he replied, dryly. Then his massive eyes settled on the princess, studying her. She resisted the urge to shrink under his penetrating gaze, as dark and aged as the heart of a mountain. Finally, he decided, "You have not told her."

"No."

A strain of silence followed, the tree waiting patiently for his disapproval to be acknowledged, and the Calamity too stubborn to budge. Eventually he realized it was foolish to challenge a tree to a game of patience and changed the subject.

"I have the strength. I have the sealing power. I only need the Sword."

"And you are wondering if it will accept you," he surmised. "As you are now, I cannot say whether you are worthy or not. But I do sense you are in a weakened state."

He frowned, but didn't contradict him. She thought of the way he had lifted the fog, of the incredible power that repelling such ancient magic must have taken, and suddenly wondered that he was still on his feet.

"We could both use some rest," she ventured, hoping to circumvent his pride. It wouldn't do for him to jeopardize their efforts on account of his ego.

He gave her an irritated sidelong glance that clearly stated he knew what she was up to. Still, it was a generous, if not transparent, gesture, and apparently he wasn't above accepting it.

"Fine," he decided curtly, and then turned on heel and stalked off into the grove.

Zelda watched him go, bristling at his irreverence. The sound of bending wood and creaking boughs made her turn, and the tree had shaped his features into a gentle smile.

"There is much to forage in this forest," he invited her. "A full stomach will help you regain your strength. Do not concern yourself with the enchantments here. I will ensure your protection."

"Thank you," she said, smiling softly. Not having eaten since the day before, she was more eager to take him up on the offer than she cared to admit aloud. But there were things eating at her worse than her hunger. She glanced carefully over her shoulder at where the Calamity had wandered; he was nearly concealed by the staggered trees, retreating further and further into the gully. "What has he not told me?"

"Perhaps you should ask him."

When Zelda turned back, his features had reverted to slabs of bark that resembled a face, perhaps, but that were too motionless to belong to anything alive. She sighed, taking that as an indication that the conversation was over, and moved off the pedestal towards the grove beneath the Deku Tree's canopy.

Unlike the spectral woods surrounding it, the grove was beautiful, and full of life: birds and tree rodents and insects with wings that looked like translucent jewels. She foraged a long meal of wildberries, delicate shrooms, low-hanging fruit, nourishing herself with the peace of that forest along with her food. She wandered slowly, exploring long after her hunger had been satisfied. It smelled of fresh growth and the sweet decay of old bracken turning brittle in the sun.

But despite the serenity, the visions still loomed in the back of her mind. Her predecessor's accusation, the torture, the Calamity's lifeless, draining body suspended over the forest—the imagery haunted her, and it seemed the more she tried to forget them the more they refused to be repressed.

She traced the fragments of her visions and her dreams, trying to isolate the threads that wove them together. She was certain there was a fuller, deeper meaning that she had yet to find. There were just too many holes.

The Calamity crouched beside her and she started. His lip twitched, amused.

"You're a little jumpy."

She glared. "What do you want?"

"I have a few more things I should teach you."

She hadn't expected the lessons to continue, but now that she'd had a taste of her own abilities, she was eager to delve deeper. An incarnation of evil wasn't the ideal instructor, of course, but at the moment she didn't have other options. She shifted and reluctantly put her glare away. He noticed, a knowing smirk tugging at the edge of his mouth.

"Telekinesis," he started, thrusting his hand to the side and calling a fallen branch to it. It whipped through the air, flying straight to his palm, and then he opened his hand, sending it hurtling away, and it splintered on a tree trunk. He plucked an acorn from the underbrush and handed it to her. "Let's start small."

She pouted in spite of herself. "I think I could handle a stick."

"So do I," he said, quirking a brow. "But if you miscalculate and hit yourself in the face, this will hurt less."

She tilted her head in acquiescence, secretly pleased. She let power pool in her hand, awaiting his instruction.

"You're just creating a channel. You're already aware of everything around you, whether you're conscious of it or not. When you tap into that awareness, you can tie your power to whatever you like, and manipulating it from there is easy. Start by exploring that awareness."

She looked up skeptically, holding the nut out in a cynical gesture. "You want me to become aware of this acorn?"

"Too clever for step one, are we?" he scowled, and then he flicked her forehead, and she scowled back. "I don't mean with your eyes, Zelda, I mean with your perception."

She rolled the acorn in her fingers, swallowing her pride. "I don't know what that means."

"You're relying too much on physical input," he decided. "Try closing your eyes. Open your palm so you're feeling it in your hand less."

She hesitated, her scowl still in place as she searched him for signs of deceit. But her desire for the knowledge won out, and she pinched her eyes shut. In the dark behind her eyelids, she instinctively fell back on her tactile senses and on the sounds disturbing the silence for information. She tried to move beyond them, deadening her sensitivity to what her body was telling her and burying herself in her mind, but it was like trying not to breathe.

"You're holding back," he murmured. "You want a waterfall, but you're only giving it a few drops of water."

Before she could question him, he put his hand on her shoulder, sending a surge of power into her veins again as he had the night he taught her fire. The power pulsed, throbbing through her headily. It grew, filling her with light, and she didn't resist, and soon everything about her body seemed… unnecessary.

He dropped his hand, letting her sustain the power on her own. In the quiet of her mind and the light, she felt the breath of the wild around her. Everything, no matter how small, how brittle, seemed to glow, and in her mind's eye she saw the acorn smoldering in her palm. She touched it with her thoughts, and felt it rise out of her palm as she guided it upwards.

A breeze moved through the glade, tousling every shuddering blade of grass, every spindly skeleton of leaf and diaphanous damselfly wing, and she tracked them as they went, sensing where they landed and settled amidst the underbrush. Her perception went out of her like a heartbeat, pulsating as far as the edge of the forest's enchantment. And she could feel everything in between.

"Zelda."

His voice brought her back to herself, and she opened her eyes. All around them the woods were dancing, alight with seedpods and fern fronds, pebbles, forgotten twigs and broken butterfly wings and coils of shriveled leaves, all suspended in the air and catching sunlight like a thousand glittering spangles. She gasped, snuffing her power out, and they rained back to the forest floor.

"I wouldn't have stopped you," he murmured, his eyes glinting with the ghost of a smile, "but you were about to start uprooting the trees."

She stared, a little shaken. "Maybe that's enough magic for one day."

He nodded, his lips pursing. Then his eyes slid away from hers, pensive, and he took a quiet, hesitant breath. "There is something else."

The tenor of his voice had changed, and she swallowed reflexively, her eyes widening as it registered. She didn't know what in all the world could make him hesitate.

"I don't know what will happen to the power of the gods when I'm destroyed. The pieces might fracture, scattering across Hyrule, or they might find new bearers from this era. But there's a chance they might resonate in you." He harnessed her gaze again, his eyes piercing in their resolve. "If that happens, you must never use the wish."

She blinked. "What wish?"

"The wish," he repeated again, incredulous. "The one wish promised by the gods, when the Triforce becomes whole and falls to someone worthy, someone with a balanced heart—" he stopped, scanning her eyes for signs of recognition and finding none. He sighed. "Unbelievable," he muttered, and then recovered himself. "It doesn't matter. It might not happen. But if it does, don't use it. There's too much that could go wrong."

She nodded, still unsure—she had never heard of such a wish, and didn't know what a Triforce was—but the finality in his voice didn't leave much room for argument, and she was slowly learning not to fight him when it came to matters concerning magic. She brought up a quandary of her own instead.

"What did the Deku Tree mean," she prompted, watching him curiously, "when he said there was something you hadn't told me?"

He scoffed. "He can tell you himself once you destroy me."

"You mean after I kill you," she corrected quietly, and his eyes went to hers, indignant. She wasn't sure what had moved her to say it; only that, just before she had, the vision of him swaying in the forest vines had filled her mind and stuck painfully in her stomach.

"Can a curse be killed? Is it even alive in the first place?" he demanded, anger swelling suddenly in him, but then he checked. He repeated, getting up before she could press the issue and leaving her alone amidst the trees, "It doesn't matter."

She didn't follow him. When the sun began to go down hours later, she walked back the way she had come, foraging an evening meal on the way.

She found him eventually near dusk. He spared her an acknowledging glance, as she trod to him across the moss and fallen blossoms, but didn't engage her beyond that. A chill was starting to flood the forest floor, but he didn't move from the log he sat on to remedy it.

"No fire?" she prodded.

"Build it yourself," he muttered. "We both know you're not helpless."

She frowned at the bitterness in his voice, but didn't argue, moving to collect suitable kindling. She sparked some fire in her hand, disconcerted with how effortless it had become. Then an idea spun a tiny web in her mind, and she let herself get snagged in it, using her senses to pull at brambles, twigs, and branches without shifting from her spot. When her work was done, she wandered back to where he was, and let the hovering fireball of brushwood she had constructed fall unceremoniously between them.

"Not bad," he remarked dryly. He hadn't even looked at it.

She resisted the urge to scowl, settling silently beside it. They sat for a long time, neither saying a word, listening to the tinder snap as the fire devoured it and the staggered chirping of the insects. His disgruntled silence ate at her, thickening the air around him like a bad aura until she could hardly stand to be near him.

"You're impossible to please," she finally growled and when he didn't respond, she let herself carry on, blindly trying to provoke him. "And you're moody, and bad-tempered, and ungrateful!"

He stared at her then, his expression a strange amalgam of troubled disbelief. "Why does any of that come as a surprise to you?"

She sighed, falling onto her back. She listened to the night noise; she recognized the katydids, the crickets, and the tree frogs, but something else warbled occasionally, adding to the symphony with its unfamiliar call.

Finally, she said, "I don't know."

He scoffed at her. "Go to sleep, princess."

Visions and cold sensations welled in her mind, and she closed her eyes.

"I don't think I can," she whispered.

"Afraid of the nightmares?" he mused, and she turned to head to glare at him. His eyes were dancing with firelight. "What did you see?"

"Nothing I care to share with you." She sat up again, trying to glare more effectively, but then her expression eased a little in spite of her own stubborn intentions, overtaken by her curiosity. "What did you see?"

It was a long time before he answered. Finally, he murmured, "Only the truth."

Then he left his place on the log, rounding the fire to crouch beside her. She watched the orange coils undulate in the blue circles of his eyes. In their own, untamed way, they were beautiful. She hadn't noticed before, perhaps because she had found them too frightening, or because the undercurrent of his evil was always repulsing her. But she didn't feel it then; she felt the opposite, drawn in, and with his face as near to hers as it was obeying that pull would have brought them tantalizingly close, so close he could've pressed his lips to hers.

"Would you like me to?"

Her eyes fluttered back to his, and she realized he was offering to put her to sleep. She flushed a little at her errant train of thought, hoping it was disguised by the fire, and nodded. At least he was asking before putting her under, now; that was progress.

Too bad she was going to help him kill himself tomorrow.

She laid herself back down, getting as comfortable as she could on the uneven place beside the fire. He hovered over her for a moment; he took a breath to say something, but then changed his mind, sighing, and ran his fingers over her eyes, and she fell breathlessly into the dark.

Out of that darkness, the scene of the battle she had seen before breathed to life in her mind. It was chaos, churning with smoke and fire and malice.

He was screaming. The chaos was swirling, constricting, drawn towards him as her power tethered them together, funneling its incredible, amorphous mass into his mortal form. His face twisted in agony as the evil ripped into him, forced inside by her magic, and then tried to tear its way out, fighting the prison he was becoming for it. A spark ignited on his hand, and his sword flew out of his grasp, clattering as it skidded against the flagstones.

Her own screams were trapped in her throat, held too tightly to slip out as she focused her power. She could barely see the merger happening through the hot tears blurring her vision and trailing down her cheeks, but the sound of his pain, echoing endlessly in her ears, more than made up for it. She knew it was working.

The monstrosity pushed back against her light and against its prison, tearing an agonized sound from him that she imagined would've accompany his body being ripped asunder. She forced the last of her strength into the sealing, and felt the transfer coalesce. He held his head in his hands, another scream erupting from him as the burden of containing it fell on him alone.

It was so much smaller, so much lighter, when it was trapped in him. Extinguishing it was no harder than taking a breath and blowing out a candle. And so, with gentle breath, she cast him out of their world.

The light snapped out, an eerie silence taking its place, and she let her head loll back, her power spent and her life quickly slipping away.

Her blood was pooling beneath her, rushing out of innumerable wounds. The Guardians that were left powered down all over the battlefield, heralding an end to it all. A weak, breathless sob broke out of her throat.

" _Link…_ "

Dark started crowding her vision, claiming her wholly. Salty tears mixed beneath her temple with blood, and as her heart thudded its last, tremulous effort to keep her alive, she felt only one thing.

Regret.


	6. Revelation

_A/N: Finally finished this chapter! Sorry for the wait. Firstly, thank you so much to everyone who left me a review. You make me glad I'm sharing this instead of keeping it holed away on my hard drive. Also, this story has also breached the 100 follower mark, which is super exciting! I'm so glad you guys like this premise and I hope you enjoy the way it all unfolds._

 _I'm looking forward to getting your feedback on this next one—it's something of a necessary crossroads in the story—so please leave a review if you're so inclined!_

 **Revelation**

Breath shunted like fire into her lungs as she breached the surface of the memory, gasping for air. She sat up, her hand flying to her chest as she tried to keep her heart from bursting out of it. She was drowning in grief that was not hers, tasting the bitter, metallic taste of someone else's guilt on her tongue. A scream welled and broke in her throat, and she dug her fingernails into her scalp, shaking with panicked sobs that shuddered out of her without tears.

She couldn't breathe. The raw, undiluted _gruesomeness_ of what she had done coiled behind her ribs, sitting in her like a stone. She had saved thousands of lives from an untimely, perhaps even horrific death, yes; but death came for everyone, eventually, and though it was nothing to rejoice in, it was at least natural. There was nothing natural about what she had done.

Songs must have been written about that night, she realized bitterly. The minstrels probably painted her choiceless and cornered, spinning dark, romantic lyrics around their tragic parting as they made the ultimate sacrifice for the world they loved. But she knew the truth, the ugliness of it. She had had a choice. And she chose to send him into a fate so much worse than death.

She condemned the man she loved to 10,000 years of torture that no mortal was meant to endure.

His name blazed across her mind like a streak of light, and in that moment she knew him. She knew the quiet half-smile he wore when she caught him staring; she knew the way his gentleness tempered his strength; she knew the warmth of his arms around her when he had pulled her into his saddle one frigid winter day, when her hands were too cold to grip the reins, and the satisfied glint in his eye, as he guided the horse through the deep snowdrift, when she didn't fight him. She knew they weren't her memories at all. But she knew him.

She scanned the woods, stumbling to her feet when he was nowhere to be found. She rallied her power, closing her eyes and expanding the field of her perception in all directions. He wasn't far; his glow was strong, pulsing rhythmically with the heartbeat of the forest. She made her way into the grove and found him not long afterward, lingering listlessly among the oaks.

For a moment she was speechless, overwhelmed by so many cavernous emotions, most of which she hadn't had time enough to process and which didn't truly belong to her. Watching him now, hauntingly familiar, she was plagued by the notion that she had come so close to willingly murdering an innocent person, and by a singular, unanswerable question: How had she been so blind?

"Link," she choked out.

He didn't turn, or even acknowledge her. Another sob welled in her chest, and she shook her head, frustrated and desperate. Hot, angry tears spilled from her eyes, and her hands fisted; she felt thrown into the clutches of madness, burning with fury and regret that were not hers.

She shouted, "Link!"

Finally he turned, his piercing, two-toned eyes settling begrudgingly on her. "What about him?"

She paused, absorbing his tenor. It was guarded, but mostly it was resigned.

"You knew," she breathed, the pieces snapping idly into place. "You knew I would remember."

"No, I didn't know. But I suspected." His eyes darkened, peering back into memory. "You've said that name before, in your sleep."

She shook her head again, so bitter; so angry; so miserable. "How could you do this? How could you lead me into this without telling me the truth?"

"The truth?" he scoffed. "You're a child, bearing a power you can barely restrain and that you don't understand, trying to control a fate you know nothing about—what do you know of truth?"

"I know who you are!"

He stalked dangerously forward, daring her to challenge him again. "And who am I?"

"The Hero," she hurled defiantly, standing her ground and raising her chin. "The one chosen by the Sword that Seals the Darkness. The one destined to fight the Calamity and—"

"He doesn't exist anymore," he interrupted brusquely. "He ceased to exist the moment the Calamity entered him."

"That's not true," she insisted, half-countering, half-begging. "You are the Hero. That's why you spared me. That's why you spared the Outpost. That's why you're trying to destroy yourself, why you're trying to stop the Calamity from ever rising again! You still control it!"

"Control it?" he echoed incredulously. "Is that where this sudden, misplaced esteem is coming from? You think that I contain him? That the Calamity is trapped in me?" He came even closer, his eyes burning with a fury so ancient she couldn't begin to understand it. "Well, let me disabuse you of that notion. I _am_ the Calamity, just as much as I am your precious hero. Whatever wrath I restrain is my own, and you're a fool for thinking otherwise."

The anger ebbing off him should have been a warning, but she was possessed well beyond caution. The remorse rattled inside her like a beast, tearing itself out with sure, deliberate strokes. "That isn't your fault. You shouldn't have to pay for the mistakes she made!"

"You have the gall to say she made mistakes," he accused her darkly, "you who reap the benefits of her choices? You're only alive and you're kingdom is only standing because of what she did."

"I'm not so blind that I think that makes it _right_ ," she hissed. "This is wrong, and I won't have any part in it! I won't help you kill yourself!"

His lip curled, baring a sliver of white tooth as he tried to rein his anger, and he forced himself to retreat. He turned his back on her and paced away a few steps before he whirled, his frustration finally breaking through his collected exterior.

"This is exactly why I kept the nature of what I am from you! I knew you would let your idealistic, inflated sense of justice get in the way of your judgment. Zelda knew what had to be done, and she didn't hesitate to do it just because it was morally questionable!"

"You think this is what she _wanted_?" she demanded, breathless.

"She did her duty!"

"She loved you!"

"I know that!"

Silence fell between them, charged with anger and despair the world should never have forgotten. His eyes bored into hers across the distance separating them, and she felt the fresh sting of her own shame. Of course he had known. In that moment, suspended in his penetrating gaze, she did feel like a child. She could see her own presumptuousness, the staggering inexperience that made her unfit to be his counterpart and that made her incapable of truly comprehending everything he had lost. She had never even been in love; certainly not in the way she had loved him. It had filled her, ripping her asunder even as the Calamity had tried to tear him in two.

"She did her duty, Zelda," he repeated, more controlled. "And you have to do yours."

She shook her head again, folding her arms. "No."

"How are you so incredibly arrogant?" he growled. "You barely know your own lore, your own history, the nature of any of this, and you think you can just make things end the way you want through sheer force of will?"

"I know I'm young!" she shouted. "But this is wrong! And I'm the only one who can begin to make amends for what happened!"

"You can make amends by doing as I say!" he bit back, raising his voice to meet hers. "The Calamity has to be destroyed, or all of this will have been for nothing!"

"There has to be another way!"

"There is no other way!" he roared, so loudly it was hardly human, and she had to call upon every ounce of her strength not to cower. "I have to be destroyed!"

More tears, hot and visceral, streamed down her face as she fought him, her throat raw and her voice vaulting as she screamed. "You shouldn't have to make that sacrifice!"

"She made that sacrifice as much as I did, and I won't dishonor her memory by undermining what she's done! This is what she wanted!"

"She never wanted this!" She was screaming at him, screaming at fate, screaming at the gods themselves. But it seemed, no matter how loud she made herself or how desperately she tried to make them see, that none of them would ever understand the agony his Zelda had felt. It was burning a hole right through her middle. "She regretted it! She regretted it the moment it happened, and she died regretting it!"

He stopped, the rigid lines of his face jumping as though she'd slapped him. The world felt unnaturally still in his ensuing silence. Holding its breath. She watched as something dark rose in him, something feral and shapeless and old, until whatever was holding it back finally broke.

Power ruptured out of him like the quivering, low note of a harp, whipping the forest with a squall that bent the trees until they threatened to snap. The old oaks groaned, too massive to bend, and the mossy ground heaved as their roots lifted beneath it. Zelda's startled cry was pulled out of her mouth by the wind, and she threw her arms over her face, shielding her eyes from debris. As his power hit its apex, bursting out of him, he flung the runoff furiously into the grove with a crack like thunder, blasting a desolate, hollow canyon as far as the brink that fell into Lake Mekar.

A scar split across the ground under his feet and branched, moving away from him like dark, jagged arteries as the power filled him; as a raw, haggard gasp pulled from his throat as it overtook him with its light. The earth shook and the trees swayed, and the air tasted of suspended electricity. The brilliant amber in his eyes warred in earnest with the vibrant blue, nearly drowning it out.

This was what he had always warned her about, she realized grimly, what he had always feared. If he lost control, no amount of desire to spare her on his part would protect her from what he was capable of. But after so many painful seconds, he drew the power back, quaking with the effort of reining his own fury.

She waited, with bated breath, for the storm to pass. The earth calmed and the wind slowly died, the canopy quivering noisily in the aftermath. He closed the distance between them as stillness settled back into the forest, panting, and his hands bit painfully into her arms. His voice was quiet, desperate and laced with warning.

"Tell me you're lying."

His clashing eyes bored into hers, piercing and unreadable, and she felt as though she were holding the last, tattered shreds of the man he used to be in her hands.

"I've seen your Zelda in visions," she whispered. "In the Lost Woods, she begged me not to let you die. Last night in my dreams, I saw her confine the Calamity inside you, and I felt—" her throat constricted, thick with the memory of her heartbreak, and she watched his eyes recede into some dark, private past, too old and tangible to question. "I'm so sorry."

He didn't release her; it seemed, his trembling hands closed firmly on her arms, that she was the anchor keeping him from losing all sense of reality, or from splintering the world with a thought. His eyes were misted over with a haze of ageless memory as he searched her, lingering and haunting like the ruined remnants of some civilization, lost to the sands of time and wiped from the annals of history, slowing eroding out of existence.

Finally, he murmured, "It doesn't matter. There isn't another way."

"She said there was a way to save you," she whispered. "She said the answer was at Thyphlo."

His eyes slid away as he digested the idea, flickering with the briefest semblance of recognition. He murmured, "That doesn't make sense."

She had no answer for that, waiting silently for him to work through the puzzle the woman from her dreams had left them, which she was woefully ill-equipped to solve herself. His grip on her arms slowly eased, and he took her face in his hands, wiping her tears away with his thumbs. His eyes searched hers, but she realized with a sinking feeling that he was looking for someone else in them.

"You won't just let me die in peace," he muttered bitterly. "I should've known."

He dropped his hands, turning silently towards the place the pedestal rested in the shadow of the Deku Tree, and she released a breath that she had held for too long.

Her legs trembled beneath her as she followed, the adrenaline that had kept her stalwart in the face of his anger beginning to wane. She fell behind as he slipped into the grove, but the pedestal wasn't far; she saw him ascending the worn stone through the trees, the image of him approaching the sword flickering in and out of sight as she drifted between the pillars of them like something secret, something hidden by the oldest magic.

She moved quietly into the clearing behind him lined with stepping stones. The Deku Tree's face was still obscured by dense, unmoving bark, seeing all but offering nothing. If he had any sour opinions on the Calamity's blasting a ravine out of his forest, he was keeping them to himself. Sunlight was filtering through the canopy of knitted blossoms, bathing the Calamity in soft blooms of color. It was like watching another dream.

"I ask you again," he murmured, still facing the sword. "Help me do this."

"I won't," she said, her voice sounding so small in the expanse.

He turned, unexpectedly, watching her from his perch on the triangular dais. His eyes still smoldered with quiet rage, but it was less pointed.

"Why?"

"Why?" she echoed disbelievingly, her brow pinching. "Hyrule owes you a debt that can never be repaid, and when I say I can't abide killing you after everything you've sacrificed, you ask me why?"

"You're doing this for me?"

His voice was so level, so bland and detached, it was hardly a question, and she threw her hands up. "Yes!"

"Has it occurred to you that this is what I want?"

She stared numbly, flinching away from his words like an unanticipated slap. Dismay seeped into her like the hazy drag of too much wine, mingling with the shame and borrowed regret. It felt like hopelessness. It felt like surrender. He moved away from the blade slowly, toward her, as though sensing her weakness; as though drawn to it.

"I've been harboring the Calamity for 10,000 years, learning its hatred, tasting its power, letting it corrupt me and knowing I will never be free of it. It filled me with its malice, rooted itself in me with barbed spores that burned as they tore into me and that still burn. It consumed me until there was nothing left." He had closed the gap, glowering down at her with an intensity that stole the breath from her chest. She was crying again; his eyes were burning like two suns trapped in a pair of moonstones. "Haven't I done enough?"

"Please don't give up," she whispered. "Not now. Take me to Thyphlo. Look for the answer with me. If there's a way to save you, it has to be there. And if it isn't—" she licked dry lips, searching briefly for a third option. There wasn't one. "If it isn't, I promise I'll help you with whatever ritual needs to be done."

He considered her offer briefly, searching her with impassive eyes. "Do you swear?"

She nodded adamantly, frantically latching onto the prospect of compromise like a piece of flotsam in a rush of floodwater. He frowned, and then took her by the wrist and led her up the stones to the dais and the sword. Her breath caught haltingly as she stumbled behind him, and he pulled her to the other side of the pedestal.

"Link—"

"We're not going anywhere without a contingency plan," he insisted in a tone that brokered no argument. "If something goes wrong, or if the answer isn't there, we use the sword. Do you understand?"

She pursed her lips unhappily, but nodded. That wasn't unreasonable. She eyed the sword, reaching for it tentatively and tracing the pommel of the hilt with her fingertips. Power emanated from it, rippling gently across her skin before she ever touched it. The sensation was strange, as though she were tasting a thought or hearing a color. She tasted the boundless, sharp edge of ageless memory on her tongue, of untold stories, of futures that never were and a past shrouded in incongruous riddles. She heard the discordant hue of its endless history, of dark blood eaten over too many lifetimes, of divine fires forging its desperate beginning before the world was.

He didn't move at first, watching the sword with frustrated reluctance. He reached for it finally, testing the limits of the magic that repelled him, and growled under his breath, "This is madness."

His hand stopped short of the hilt, shuddering as it was entangled in a web of enchantment. The Sword reacted to him, glowing, and Zelda wrapped her arms around herself without thinking, shivering as the power ebbing off it wafted over her.

"I can't get closer," he murmured, frowning. "I need your power."

She took a breath, steeling her frayed nerves. "What do I do?"

"Place your hands over mine," he instructed, reaching out with his other hand so that both were extended towards the sword as if to grasp it. "Then direct your sealing magic there. Only there."

She stared, startled. "Will that work?"

"The Calamity and this body are tied together. You can't seal one without the other. But it might recede."

"Recede?" she echoed, skeptical. "Is that even possible?"

"He didn't say anything to the contrary," he growled, his eyes flickering indignantly to the Deku Tree. "But it is just a theory."

She hesitated, her hands floating near his, internally warring with her uncertainty. Their hands hovered in two curved rows, encircling the hilt. It glowed between them like a star ringed in a halo of moonlight.

"Won't that hurt you?"

His reply was taut with impatience. "I don't expect that it will feel very pleasant."

"But what if I—"

"Zelda. Stop asking questions."

She fisted her hands, briefly, before opening them again. Then, carefully, she called on the sealing power. She let it fill her completely before she acted, until light shone out of her skin; then she channeled it, keeping the power confined to the sphere her hands surrounded.

He took a quiet, full breath as the power touched him. It wasn't enough; it lingered on his skin, not quite penetrating deep enough to make the dark in him recoil. She grimaced as she poured more power into the sealing. She could feel it separating the pieces of him, tangibly peeling one away and leaving the other. Flaying him alive. But it was working.

The Calamity drew back from the mortal form it inhabited, repelled, and all at once the sword let him approach.

His hands grasped the hilt and the blade shuddered, recognizing him as its master and its enemy at once. It hummed darkly as he began to pull, as though in warning; light emanated from the slot in the pedestal and she felt, subliminally, the essence of the sword binding itself to him.

Metal scraped against stone and her pulse fluttered. It was moving.

The Sword pulsed between his hands, throbbing in time with his heartbeat. His eyes were shut, the muscles of his jaw clenching as it tested him. The blade sang against the stone again as it slid further out of the pedestal, and power ebbed from it like a burst of wind. The vibrations intensified, rattling the pebbles on the dais and jarring her bones. The sound of it seemed to fold on itself, expanding and imploding at once. It resonated until her lips and her fingers tingled and she thought the trunks of the trees might splinter, and then it stopped.

The blade rang out as he unsheathed it from the rock, a clear sound that pierced the air and commanded reverence. Then it clattered against the stone as he dropped it, and he retreated a few steps, falling haphazardly to one knee. Zelda snapped the channel of her power closed, taking a reflexive step forward to steady him, but he held his hand up to deflect her approach. His palm was scorched red, blistered as though he had been holding the hot end of a branding iron.

"Just give me a moment," he said, panting.

She waited obediently, her face drawn. The sword laid magnificently at her feet; its length and edges were even more impressive than she had imagined, crafted so masterfully she knew it could have no equal in all the world. They looked like a scene out of a past that never was: he kneeling before her, his sword spread at her feet like an offering, and she waiting in silence, bathed in sunlight. A knight swearing his fealty to his queen.

She stepped unceremoniously over the sword, sitting down on the edge of the dais near him. He watched her with his piercing eyes, ever a war between sunset and twilight, still trying to catch his breath.

Exhaustion washed over her like a wave. It was done, and it was just beginning.

She turned her face up into the sunlight and closed her eyes. She drew breath, softly, and said, "I think I'm going to need more than a moment."

He rolled off his knee, slowly, pressing his back against one of the stones planted on one of the platform's three angles. She glanced at him languidly; he was resting in earnest, his head dipped back against the rock.

They stayed like that a long time. The world seemed to suspend. Her mind was turbulent and swarming as she tried to absorb the whirlwind of their argument and the bewildering new undertaking that followed; whatever was going on in his was a mystery to her, as always. The gods only knew what had convinced him to consider her proposal. But she was glad he had. She couldn't bear the thought of abetting his suicide now, even if it meant destroying the Calamity along with him.

Finally, he murmured, "The sword needs a scabbard."

"The King had one made for you, before," she whispered, watching the ghost of someone else's memory in her mind, and she squeezed her eyes shut and let her forehead drop against her hand as she willed it away. She raked her fingers through her hair as it faded, breathless. "That's going to take some getting used to."

He sighed. It was a tired sound. "This is not a good idea."

She winced at the misgiving in his voice, opting not to acknowledge the remark. But he was insistent, moving closer until any attempt to ignore him would be blatant.

"Zelda."

She could feel his eyes boring a hole in her temple, but she closed her eyes rather than look at him. "Please don't make me go through that," she whispered bitterly. "Not again."

"In the end, I may not have a choice."

"I know."

She looked at him, finally, and his eyes searched hers carefully.

"Zelda," he confronted her pointedly, " _you_ may not have a choice."

She shook her head once, looking away. "It won't come to that."

"It might," he insisted. "I need to know that you'll be able to end this if you have to."

"It won't come to that," she repeated stubbornly, a wound cut in her 10,000 years ago suddenly too fresh to contemplate reopening. "You're the Hero. The Sword chose you. The gods chose you. You're too strong to lose yourself to this—"

" _Stop_ romanticizing me!" he yelled, so suddenly she started. He closed his eyes and took a frustrated breath, fisting one hand and loosing it as he checked his anger. "Just stop it. I am what I am. I've accepted it. It's time you accepted it, too."

She turned away, unable to conjure an answer that would satisfy either of them, and he sighed again. When he stood and left her, she didn't move to follow. She waited, alone except for the sword that lay, drawn and discarded, over the pedestal behind her. Once, she glanced imploringly at the Deku Tree, but the face never reemerged.

In that loneliness, she became numbly aware of the way time slipped through her fingers: immeasurable moments, trickling away irretrievably out of a precious limited supply, and always feeling too long or too fleeting. She tried to fathom how many moments made up an era, how it might feel to live for a hundred years, or a thousand years, or ten thousand—or how it might feel to be burning alive for that long. From some shadowy, untapped recess in her mind, words tumbled gently into her consciousness, and she flinched away from the simple truth of them: the flow of time is always cruel.

He returned some time later with a wooden scabbard, too smooth and precise to have been fashioned using anything but magic, and a matching baldric of braided vines. He handed it to her wordlessly, and she slid the blade into the sheath with some effort. The sword was even heavier than it looked, and when she went to hand it back to him, she had to hold the baldric with two hands. He slung it easily over his back, and her breath left her at the familiarity of him. Wearing the sword entrusted to him by the gods, he was the image of the Hero she had known once, or perhaps many times.

If he harbored any sentiment toward the reunion at all, he hid it well. He gave her one last scowl before he turned down the south facing path that led back into the Lost Woods, and she followed.

At the edge of the enchantment, a mouth in the fog marked the route back, and Zelda cast a grateful glance back at the colossal tree that still slept, ever watchful, above the grove. She wondered if he had known how the threads of their fates were intertwined, if he had known the strange, inexplicable way the truth would manifest itself. She wondered, hesitantly, what he knew of what was yet to come. She wondered, as she stepped over the line onto the path he had opened for them, why he kept silent.

The return journey through the woods was uneventful. The mist lapped at their feet, but never crossed their path, and in the absence of the harrowing visions that had plagued her the first time, she was able to appreciate the forest's fleeting, ethereal beauty. The mist and the moonglow, and the grey spangles that knotted whimsically in them, shifted in breathy whorls over the ancient trees; she sparked a small fire above her palm and watched the wind blow embers from the flame, and they danced lazily down the path like a smattering of fireflies.

The figure who was both the Calamity and the Hero led the way silently, the sword slung over his back flickering in the soft light where the hilt peeked out of the makeshift scabbard. There was so much she wanted to say, but words seemed clumsy, and every time she took a breath to try anyway, her tongue went numb in her mouth. A hollow maw in one of the bulbous trees cackled at her as it emerged from the mist, and she sighed.

"Link," she managed, finally. He stopped, turning slowly and waiting for her to close the distance separating them. She was wringing her hands absently, reaching for words that flitted out of her grasp like sparrows. "Thank you," she said at length, searching his impervious gaze, "for doing this for me."

His eyes narrowed, finally betraying an emotion, though it was hard to say exactly what it was. Disgust, maybe. "I'm not doing this for you."

"I didn't mean—" she breathed awkwardly, and all at once the sparrows were airborne again.

The ensuing silence was uneasy. He was eyeing her expectantly, and she was trying not to shrink away from it. But she didn't know if it was the Calamity or the Hero she had condemned whose gaze she was having so much trouble meeting.

"I know that," she amended. "I meant that I know that what I'm asking of you is not a little thing. I know it will be difficult."

"Impossible, even," he murmured darkly. There was accusation in his eyes, but he turned them away before they could do too much damage. "But I don't hold you responsible for that," he said tersely, like he was reminding himself. "Like I said, I'm not doing this for you."

She nodded, absorbing his brooding silence, and then started walking again, and he fell in step with her. She moved alongside him as they went instead of trailing behind; if she was going to ask him to keep fighting the monster within instead of helping him end it like he wanted, the least she could do was fight the instinct to keep her distance in return. At least then he wouldn't be alone.

He'd been fighting alone for so long.

They came to a wall in the mist, rising out of the earth like a curtain, and he regarded it distantly.

"I know what you're trying to do," he said quietly. "It's noble of you. But it's stupid."

She suppressed the retorts that bubbled to her lips with relative ease. Her desire to ensure his cooperation was stronger than her pride, for now.

"Are you recanting?"

"No."

She nodded, steeling herself with a breath. "Good."

She approached the fluctuating, silvery wall, feeling her way forward blindly with an outstretched hand as she stepped into it. It was enchanted, numbing her senses and blocking her perception, but there was no deception or illusion. It was simply a barrier. Then her fingertips felt the cool breeze of Hyrule, alighting against her skin like water, and she moved eagerly towards the familiarity of it.

As her hand emerged from the mist on the other side, warm fingers closed around her wrist, pulling her out of one forest and into another. Colors and textures blurred across her vision: feathers as azure as the Tabantha sky; a flare of hair, orange as the Gerudo sun; burled muscle, flinty as Eldin crags; shimmering scales, scintillating as brightly as a moonrise over an endless swathe of water.

And then the Calamity stepped across the boundary of the mist behind her, and the deadly edge of a scimitar sliced across the artery at his throat before she could scream, spraying a red film into the late morning light like spattered dew caught on a spider's web.


	7. Mind Games

_A/N: So before I address the elephant in the room, I wanted to thank everyone so so much for their reviews and support of this story. I can't tell you guys how much it means to hear that you're enjoying this, and I was blown away by the outpouring for the last chapter. Every notification in my inbox was the most exciting part of my day. So thank you, thank you, thank you!_

 _But yeah. Uhm. Wow. 7 months between updates. I am so, so sorry about that everyone. It know it's probably hard to believe, but I never stopped writing or thinking about solutions for this chapter. I waded through several different versions before I arrived at this one (like, I don't know, 8?), and honestly I still have misgivings, and since it's been so long since I've updated I feel the pressure ten-fold. But I feel like at this point I have to just accept that I'm not going to love everything about this and just get it out there and move on with it._

 _Thanks again for your patience. This chapter has only been roughly edited, and may undergo some stylistic changes as I have time to add them later (as I did with "Duality"). But here it is. Thanks again so much for your patience. I won't let it happen again!_

 _(Remember, you can keep up with my meltdowns and/or excuses on my tumblr, embyrinitalics. I'll have a more detailed post about this update and all the scrapped versions there!)_

 _I'M SCARED! Let's do this! Bloop!_

 **Mind Games**

The stroke brought him to his knees.

For an instant there was silence, fleeting and soft like the ghost of an exhale. And then it passed, and the world broke open.

Power hemorrhaged out of him like a storm. The ground buckled beneath him and trees caught in the tremor split down their middle. The stone flanking the narrow passage into the woods cracked and shifted, and the air thinned, tasting of hot metal and of a mindless, ancient rage. A thunderhead formed out of the malice with a terrible, earsplitting sound that made their blood slog. Somehow, Zelda knew where it would end: the taste on her tongue, the burn of the noxious vapor on her skin, the familiar, primal dread that coiled in the pit of her stomach—it was all just like the battlefield of her dreams.

Link was in the thick of it, writhing, his head in his hands and his fiery eyes wild. She had seen that look on his face before, indelibly preserved in undying, borrowed memory—the look of a man who was losing himself. A glaring streak of blood oozed across his neck, betraying where the wound, now mended, had been. A stifled, grating roar was pulling out of his throat, too loud to be his—too loud to be human—and the amber threads in his eyes were burning so brightly they were consuming them.

It was the monster in him, surging inexorably to life. And a monster in her was rising to meet it.

Light, alien, irresistible, flooded her from someplace untapped, someplace old and forgotten, sweeping her downstream in its current and filling her with a quiet rage so primal and furious that it matched his. It urged her forward and she listened, ignoring the startled cries from the others as she stepped unflinchingly into the storm that threatened to tear the world apart.

His eyes met hers as she moved through squall and malice, drawing closer until she loomed over him like a vengeful star. They were desperate beneath the wrath—begging her to fulfill the promise she had refused to make.

She was an ember, luminous, molten and untouchable, glowing so brilliantly her light might have rivaled the gods themselves. In her mind's eye she could see the two entities inhabiting the same space before her, pulling desperately at each other: one trying to hold on, and one furiously trying to break loose. She could see the residue of the magic that bound them together, pulsing with its own vibrant radiance. She could see the pounding heart of the man caught in the center of it, trapped between two warring powers that no mortal could hope to contain.

Zelda took his face in her hands—a goddess, condescending to soothe her chosen hero.

And the world became light, engulfing and viscous, flooding the crevices of her consciousness like a flow of honey and swallowing it whole.

What was left was immutable and static, cradling her in warmth as it blotted out memory of anything else. The light blurred and rippled, thrummed with a heartbeat so familiar it ached. Then it parted, color and memory seeping through it and painting a dark, fire-spattered room in her mind from the ruins of a castle that had crumbled to time long ago.

Stonework and shadow shaped around her in a whisper, melting slowly into something tangible until she was surrounded by sensation, breaking gently into her awareness until it was all she knew.

The flickering light of the flames in the hearth.

The warmth of his breath.

The heat of his hands, burning through the soft fabric of her dress as he drew her closer.

He was kissing her, desperate and miserable and so careful all at once, and she was dizzy with the feel of him. He whispered her name, brazenly, fervently, and she shivered at the longing in it.

He had never touched her before, not like this. But she had no intentions of telling him to stop. Even if it was indulgent, and impossible, and totally, indefensibly, scandalously inappropriate.

He dropped his forehead against hers, breathing, and took her hands rigidly.

"Forgive me," he said. "That was—"

She covered his mouth with her fingertips, silencing whatever might have followed. Given his station and his duty to her, and the massive impropriety of what he had just done, it couldn't have been anything good. She met his eyes, half-lit by the fire and so beautifully blue. They reminded her of a cold autumn sky, so rich and so unalterably, heartrendingly transient that it hurt to look at it. It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed her mind.

But she had rather gotten used to that dull ache. Even craved it. He held her gaze, letting her burn in it, waiting for judgment. All sense was leaving her, and she couldn't be bothered to care. She only knew, relinquishing to it, to him, that she couldn't fathom how she had lived without it for so long.

She laced her fingers behind his jaw, squeezing her eyes shut as though she could block out the impossibility of what they were doing, and pressed her lips to his again with a sigh. He overcame his surprise in the span of a heartbeat, pulling her flush against him and threading his fingers in her hair. Her heart leapt into her throat as she reveled in the resolution of it, of his strong arms drawing her closer and his gentle touch coaxing more out of her, of his sudden boldness, and the way his every thirsty, languid stroke, fueled by desire that had been pent up and stoked for far too long, whispered and breathed things neither of them had ever been at liberty to say.

It was nourishment and the sweetest deprivation at once, filling her with a warmth that could banish any darkness but leaving her wanting so much more. It made every nerve in her body sing.

Then he stopped, pulling away slowly, and her breath went with him. His eyes searched hers, flitting uncertainly between them, and a crease formed in his brow.

He murmured, "This isn't real."

Zelda blinked, falling suddenly, unexpectedly, horrifyingly, into herself.

She couldn't find her voice, or even move, struck dumb and paralyzed in the realization that this memory was different from the others—that it was being shared.

His expression changed as she transformed, as the illusion of their waking dream began to bleed, and his eyes burned furiously.

"What are you doing here?" he seethed.

"I don't—I don't know—"

"Is this some kind of a joke to you?" he demanded, his fingers biting painfully into her arms where he held her. "You think just because you have her memories that they're yours to do with as you please?"

"No!" she blurted, panic rising chokingly into her throat. "I didn't mean to do this—"

"Well undo it!" he shouted, shoving her away and sending her stumbling into the mantle.

"I don't know how!" she yelled back pitifully, mortified tears streaming down her face. "It was an accident!"

He paced away from her once, trying to calm himself, but he wasn't any less livid for it when he turned around again. She tried, hopelessly, desperately, to free them both, trying to picture anything that was real—the woods, the malice and the storm that had risen out of him, the fury that had overtaken her—but nothing made the illusion unravel.

"This is how you operate when you don't get your way, then?" he sneered. "Prick the Calamity, see if he bleeds?"

She whispered, swallowing another bitter rush of tears, "I told you it was an accident."

"Magic doesn't just materialize out of nothing," he spat, closing the distance between them again. "What did you want to know? If it would hurt me to relive this? If I could even tell the difference between you?"

She winced away from his accusations, still breathless and her lips still burning from the heat of his kiss. "No!"

"Then what?" he demanded, taking her by the arms again. "Do you want me to admit that you remind me of her? That I'm in agony every time I look at you? Is that it?"

"I don't want anything!" she shouted miserably, struggling uselessly in his grip. "Let me go!"

"Would it please you to know that I am?" he asked more quietly, and she stilled, wide-eyed. He let his hands drop, finally, and said, his lip curling, "Every time."

The breath stole out of her chest as he left her there, crossing to the window; the world outside it was a vague, piecemeal reconstruction of the castle grounds from too many eras, part memory and part magic. She held herself where she stood beside the fire, exhausted and trembling.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice quivering, because there was nothing else to say.

"You couldn't have just done as I asked," he growled, staring into the glistening miasma and mismatched spires. "You couldn't have just stabbed me through the heart and spared us both—" he turned, gesturing futilely, "this."

She just stood there and let him blame her, too drained to put up a fight and knowing he was too angry to win against besides. The lull that followed was humid; she looked down at her dress, the way the dark material hugged her torso and flared elegantly just below her hips. She must have seemed such an impostor in it.

He leaned resignedly, bitterly, against the wall and crossed his arms. Firelight reflected off his eyes in the dark like knife edges, piercing and glinting and stone cold. "Exactly how long are you planning on keeping us trapped here?"

She turned to stare into the flames so she wouldn't have to look at him. "I told you I don't know how to undo it."

"Well," he said, scathingly, "it's very good."

She frowned, fixating on the fire. The warmth, the illusion of it, was so real. She reached towards it slowly, testing the limits of it, letting her fingers drift closer to the heat until they stung, until they burned. She snapped her hand back with a hiss when tears sprung into her eyes, examining her reddened fingertips.

"How did you know?" she whispered hollowly. "This world always seemed so real. I never once thought to question it. But you knew."

"Because these aren't just her memories. They're mine," he murmured, his footsteps drawing closer until he ghosted, blurry, dappled in light and shadow, into her peripheral vision. He took her hand in his gingerly, turning it over, examining it distantly as he set about healing the damage. "I remember what I thought, what I felt, and I'm not the same. I didn't have this hatred in me back then. No amount of illusion could disguise that."

She kept her eyes glued to her palm, watching the blisters recede to reveal healthy, milky skin beneath. He stared, too, fixated on her hand, or perhaps on the image of his hand cradling hers.

"But it is good," he said quietly, finally. "I haven't felt this human since…"

He trailed off, dropping his hand and staring into the fire. She looked at him finally, examining his eyes in the firelight. It was barely perceptible, masked in illusion, but they weren't the crystalline, pristine blue she remembered. His pupils were ringed in the faintest halo of amber—a sunset submerged in ice.

"Maybe that was the point," she offered quietly, and he met her eyes.

"It's just another prison."

Because none of it was real. It was just another painful reminder of everything he had lost.

Suspended in his gaze, voiceless, pliant, she thought she could see through his calloused exterior to something older, something familiar. Something burdened. Her own exhale passed over her lips, feathery and soft, and she unconsciously drifted closer.

Then he raised his hand toward the mantel and summoned a shock of power, tearing stone and mortar apart and putting out the fire with the force of it, and then turned and did the same to the window, blasting the wall apart and pulling in a backdraft of miasma and debris. She threw her arms over her face with a cry, battered by shrapnel and a wind spurred by rupturing magic, and fleetingly tasted blood. She shouted at him from under the crook of her elbow, as furious as she was frightened.

"What are you doing?!"

"Looking for a way out," he growled, raising his voice over the squall of the collapsing illusion.

"There's a door right over there! You couldn't have used that?"

"And wandered even deeper into your labyrinth?" he sneered. "I don't think so."

Then he turned his palm facedown, and before she could stop him he was blasting away the floor at their feet. She screamed, plummeting through illusion and fire and light out of one harrowing reality and into another.

For the briefest moment, she was suspended in a void between the two, a nothingness bridging worlds and minds, as their link severed. She felt hollow, bereft, as the last, lingering vestiges of their telepathic connection dispersed. And in the quiet, soft as a wind or a breath, she thought she heard him say her name.

And then she snapped back into herself like a crack of thunder.

The Calamity roared, sucked into its host as by a powerful tide, and as soon as it was sealed the well of her power clapped closed. The woods trembled in the aftermath, and then swallowed the last, resonant echoes of it.

She met his eyes in the expanding stillness, panting, afraid, lost in the vastness of her own strength. There was nothing but hatred burning in them. She didn't know why she had expected anything else.

He was catching his breath, too, as he glowered. She wanted to shrink out from under the accusation in them, but she was frozen, suspended in his judgment. Then his eyes slid beyond her, and the hate burned brighter.

"You," he growled, hastening to his feet, and Urbosa, standing amidst the other Champions, still dumbstruck and bewildered, had the wherewithal to raise her sword as they took a collective, haphazard step back. "Do you realize what you could have done?!"

"Link, stop," Zelda ordered, putting a restraining hand over his collarbone and feeling for the reassuring edge of her power. "They didn't know!"

She could feel him quaking under her hand, but his rage showed no signs of progressing beyond that, tempered by a tighter grip on his self-control—or perhaps by exhaustion. She could feel her own strength beginning to buckle as the adrenaline coursing through her waned.

"Princess," Revali called testily, flint-sharp gaze still fixed on the Calamity and muscles sprung taut to react. "Would you care to explain what in Hylia's name is going on?"

Mipha angled her spear cautiously, and Link's hand flexed. The situation was teetering dangerously close to a violent precipice, and she didn't know how to resolve it. Not alone. She put herself squarely in his way, imploring with her eyes.

She whispered, "Please don't do this. Don't make me fight both of you."

"Zelda," Urbosa urged her. "What did we not know?"

Link clenched his fists and his jaw, making the muscles at his temple bulge. Then he met her eyes begrudgingly, and his wrath slowly began to cool. She sighed softly, grateful and relieved, and then turned to face the others.

She said, letting her shoulders sag at the simplicity of it, "Who he is."

And then, the moment her back was turned, Link's hand brushed the base of her skull, and all she managed was a gasp before she was collapsing under the weight of an artificial darkness.

She drifted back towards consciousness later, as the seconds began unwinding again, sensation filtering slowly through the fog of his magic. She felt the heat of the sun beating down on her; the caress of a warm wind; and then, contrasting against them, ice, holding her close and carrying her over a steady stride.

Her heart sputtered and her eyes flew open as she tried to get her bearings. She thrashed ineffectively in his arms, instinctually diving away from the cold, or from the evil, or both; his profile was ringed in harsh sunlight, shielding his eyes when she tried to find them.

"Put me down!" she shrieked, breathless, and when he complied she stumbled backward, and then to the ground as her legs gave out. She panted as her exhaustion registered, bewildered, trembling, "How many times have we jumped?"

He crouched beside her, his eyes finally catching light. "A few."

She sighed, exasperated and dreading the recovery, and quickly scanned her surroundings. There was nothing but grassy hillside, a smattering of trees, and the sound of water lapping at a sunken shore. "Where are we? Where are the others?"

He pointed over the ridge, and she followed the gesture over her shoulder. The mushrooming silhouette of the Thyphlo Ruins loomed ponderously on the horizon, dark and impermeable, like some sort of bad omen. She scowled at it. By the look of things, they were nearing the end of the hills that skirted Lake Mekar and dipped into the Badlands.

"I'm sure your friends are in pursuit by now. But they'll be hard pressed to catch us before we reach it."

She glared at him, soured. "I asked for your _help_."

"And I'd say I delivered," he frowned, and when she didn't move to thank him his eyes narrowed incredulously. "Don't tell me you actually thought I would let you bring them with us."

"They're sworn to me," she said tersely, but he scoffed at her before she could argue further.

"The last thing we need is more variables. This whole endeavor has become complicated enough as it is."

"They would've helped us—"

"They would've been a _liability_ ," he snapped, "or was what happened this morning not evidence enough?"

She swallowed, unwilling to provoke him on that front. It was exactly what he had feared would happen, and she knew how close they had all come to inadvertently unleashing something horrible on the world.

"Am I back to being your prisoner, then?" she said bitterly, and he tilted his head slowly, searching her eyes.

"What makes you think you ever weren't?"

Her brow puckered at the unexpected truth of it, and she couldn't help the hurt in the question that bubbled to her lips. "Why are you doing this?"

"You asked me to."

In his usual, twisted, corrupted way, he wasn't wrong. She had asked him to take her to Thyphlo. She had asked him not to make her fight all of them at once. And now here they were—half way to their destination, and alone.

"You know this isn't what I meant. When I realized—I thought—" she cut off, pressing her fingers frustratedly to her temple, and tried again. "When I said I wanted you to come with me to Thyphlo—"

"Disappointed?" he interrupted acidly. "Having second thoughts?"

Her eyes swept to his, depthless and unwavering. "Yes, I am disappointed."

"You have another option," he said levelly, and his cold indifference made words catch in her throat. As angry as she was, as betrayed as she felt, her resolve to save him hadn't faltered.

"No," she whispered. "I won't do that."

"Well then," he said, opening his hands, and she turned her face away bitterly as he stood.

He moved to the edge of the hill, scouting their route. Her hands fisted in the grass. Of course he had tricked her again. It had been naive to think that uncovering the truth he was so careful to hide would have suddenly changed the nature of their relationship, or the nature of who he was. But she had wished it. And the disillusionment stung.

"I could resist you," she challenged. "Buy the others some time."

He regarded her quietly a moment, considering. "Do you really want to fight me?"

"No, not really," she breathed tiredly. "But I'm not about to be cowed into bowing to your every whim."

"Then you should take the Sword now," he said, and cut her off with a sharp look when she made to argue. Dark power was building threateningly in him like a foul wind, full of evil and intent, and his point was made. "I won't give you a choice."

Her teeth met with an audible click. As much as she wanted to call his bluff, she wouldn't put it past him to force her hand if she decided to be difficult. His power cooled when she didn't have an immediate response; she was out of ideas, short of throwing a tantrum.

She sighed. "So where does that leave us?"

"With you doing as I say."

She pursed her lips, disgruntled, while she thought. She wasn't overly fond of being manipulated, spellbound, and dragooned into submission whenever he liked. But as he had pointed out, she did have a choice. It had always been his intention to die by the Sword, and it was a concession on his part that they were undertaking this journey at all. Not that that excused his behavior; but she always had the option to end it, if she wished.

He seemed to sense that she had lost the will to argue, something pulling out of his voice, too, making him sound tired.

"Can you walk?"

"I think so," she murmured, accepting his hand gingerly as she hefted herself off the ground. Her legs shook, but they were usable. They started slowly across the slope, headed north. "I'll have you know I don't approve of this."

He spared her an irritated glance. "Of what?"

"Of you kidnapping me again; putting a spell on me; carting me unconscious across Hyrule like a piece of luggage," she recited. "Goddesses know what you've done to the others."

He scoffed. "They're fine."

"All I'm saying is, we could do with some boundaries."

" _Boundaries_?" he demanded, so caustically she flinched, spinning to meet her eyes incredulously. "After what you did, you want to lecture me about boundaries?"

Heat rose condemningly into her cheeks. "I said I was sorry!"

"Because you were found out?" he glowered, closing the distance between them. "Or because you didn't get the reaction you wanted?"

"I told you it was an accident! What could I possibly have wanted from you?"

"I imagine a girl as insecure and inadequate as you are stands to gain quite a lot by pretending to be someone who's everything she isn't."

She winced, breathless, silenced, reeling in the face of his hate, and all at once much more was pouring out of her than even he could have accrued in their short time together.

"You think I wanted any of this?" she demanded, voice cracking as it vaulted. "To be bound to it? To be destined? I'm sorry if my best isn't good enough, but this is all the gods have given you, so stop comparing me to her!"

"That's going to be difficult if you keep _burrowing_ inside my head and impersonating her!"

"If anyone is to blame for that, it's you!"

He took a dangerous step closer. " _Me_?"

"Yes, you! You kept me in the dark, leaving me reliant on these visions for the truth. I trust them more than I trust you! None of this would have happened if you had just been honest with me in the first place!"

"None of this would have happened if you had just done as I had asked!"

"I'm trying to save your life!"

He whirled with a roar, splitting the ground open at their feet, and the water below them sloshed and spewed where the fissure zigzagged beneath the lake and up the wall of the island that housed the Lost Woods. When he turned on her again, his eyes were feral, hardly seeing through the wrath, and fear dropped like a shard of ice into her stomach.

"My life was forfeit the moment the Calamity was bound in me," he yelled, and another rupture spilled jaggedly down the hillside, spraying dirt as the ground heaved. "Do you really think I thought I might survive?"

Another geyser erupted beside him as he stalked closer, spewing dirt and stone.

"That I didn't know the moment it happened that this would be the death of me?"

And another.

"That I couldn't _feel_ it?"

The fissure at her feet split again, branching, and she stumbled back breathlessly. "Stop it!"

He grabbed her by the arms, holding her too tightly, and the blistering cold of his touch permeated the fabric of her sleeves. "Farore, Zelda, why won't you just let me die?!"

Her heart and her breath seized, certain he hadn't meant those words for her. His eyes had been wild and unseeing, staring viscerally into a past she had only glimpsed.

He stared, wide-eyed, hands trembling on her arms, as he stepped into that realization with her. His fingers kneaded into her skin as he reeled in the wake of it; then he let her go, swallowing fury, and rasped, "This was a mistake."

"No," she whispered, vacant, helpless, watching him spiral out of her influence into some dark place she couldn't follow.

"Yes. I never should have agreed to it." His expression twisted once, equal parts frustration and regret and hate, too conflicted and too _human_ to be the face of a demon, and her heart lodged in her throat. "You saw what I'm capable of!"

"Your guard was down," she tried to reason, but he silenced her with a disparaging look.

"As long as I breathe, Hyrule is just one bad decision away from being thrown into chaos. You know the kind of devastation I would cause. I can't just go running off with you on some fool's errand!"

"You promised," she said, voice wavering, but she knew he wouldn't be held to it.

"End this," he insisted, ribboned eyes boring into hers. "Put the Master Sword through my heart and keep us bound until he dies with me."

She pinched her eyes shut, trying to steel herself against his demands. "Don't ask that of me. Not yet. If we go to Thyphlo Ruins—"

"Zelda, there's nothing there!" he shouted, and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter. "If there was any other way, don't you think I would know about it?"

Suddenly, confronted with his ire and his hopelessness, she knew why he had agreed to come with her; suddenly, she knew what she had to say to keep him with her, to keep him alive; suddenly, she knew how much it would hurt him.

She opened her eyes and whispered, "It's what she wanted."

She saw a new wave of fury course through him, and irresolution spilling consumingly into its wake. He was rigid, the muscles in his jaw spasming as he gritted his way through a conflict she could only guess at. Something shone in his eyes, something shackled, and for a moment she felt he was as much a prisoner to her as she was to him.

"Then let's be done with this," he growled, and taking her by the wrist he started again towards the foothills of Mount Drena.

The journey was arduous. Despite the fact that he was practically dragging her as they went, she knew they weren't making good time. Between the energy she expended containing him and the toll of the teleporting, she was physically and magically exhausted, and she knew he had tempered his pace for her. But he showed her no consideration beyond that. He spoke infrequently and looked at her even less. The one time she asked him to stop of her own accord he let her go so suddenly that she stumbled to her knees in the grass. But she didn't confront him again. His anger was brimming over, and his silence, while charged, was probably better than the alternative.

Intentionally or not, she had crossed a line today, and there was no stepping back behind it.

They finally reached the edge of the Thyphlo Ruins near sunset. Its dark, still mass blotted out the sun behind it, eating whatever light it could find. The mist blooming out of it rendered all but the fringes of the island black and shapeless. Stepping into its shadow, watching the murky water moating its edge bubble putridly, she felt an unexpected loss she had no name for.

She wondered for the first time, staring into its darkened heart and shrinking under its massive bulk, what had happened here that could warrant such darkness.

Then her name carried to her on the wind, and she spun.

Atop the hill, bathed in the last of the sunset and looking a little worse for wear, were her Champions. Her heart swelled at the sight of them—in one piece, and as steadfastly, fiercely loyal to her as ever.

Then Link closed his hand tight over her wrist and pulled her inside, and they disappeared into the mist.


	8. The Curse

_A/N: I AM SO NERVOUS but I'm gonna pretend like I'm totally NOT and just ROCK THIS! YES! CONFIDENCE! Sorry I made you guys wait 6 months again. T_T Hopefully I'm past this whole spectacularly-terrified-of-writing thing and can get back to a regular schedule... but I'm going to not make a promise because I did that last time and all it did was give me anxiety. XD_

 _Thank you guys SO much for all the reviews, they're what keep me from completely collapsing in on myself and giving up when the going gets tough, and I reread them ALL the time. So, thank you! (And if you're reading this UnicornZombie YES Demons by Imagine Dragons is totally on my Calamitous playlist!)_

 _Enjoy guys._

 **The Curse**

They stepped over the boundary into a realm darker than night, choked by a curse that had been festering on the outskirts of Hyrule, devouring light, for as long as anyone could remember. Zelda stared into oblivion, her brain waiting for input—a shape, a sliver of shadow, a brush of wind—some suggestion of form or existence beyond the silent, hungry nothing sprawling away from her in all directions. The static, coppery taste of old magic danced on her tongue, mingling with stale air and stillwater, and she got the distinct impression the curse meant to devour her next. For once, she was glad for the Calamity's unforgiving grip on her wrist.

The darkness was so thick she could hardly tell if her eyes were open or closed, but even without her sight to guide her she could tell Link had gone alarmingly still. He scarcely seemed to breathe. She drifted closer, bound to his silence, clinging onto the promise of his presence like a lifeline in the oblivion.

He summoned a stellate flare, so sudden and brilliant that she flinched away from its light, illuminating his outstretched hand and the black mist pooling in it. It seemed strange to her, but harmless; whatever he saw in it captivated him, blotting out everything else. He didn't even seem to remember she was there. He studied it for too long, body rigged with tension and eyes trained so intensely on it that it made her mouth go dry.

Finally, he murmured, "This can't be."

She took a wary step closer, for all her inexperience still wise enough to know that she should fear anything that surprised him.

"What is it?"

He closed his hand slowly, smothering the darkness in his fist. He didn't answer, parsing questions far less benign in his mind. Drawing conclusions that could prove far more deadly. The light he had summoned hung discordantly in the void, its spasming diamond-shapes fluttering and convulsing like a ball of fairylight with too many wings, all bent and broken and forced to life. It spattered bone-white moonglow and shadows over the rigid line of his jaw, over the rise of bone beneath his eye and the muscles sprung taut along his neck.

When his voice finally gnawed at the silence again, his back was still turned. The words were quiet, and venomous, and so certain it made her blood run cold.

"You knew."

She blinked into the endless dark and the harsh pinprick of light, equal parts confused and terrified by the unmistakable threat in his voice. He turned, his grip on her wrist closing and the filament in his eyes smoldering dangerously. She took a breath, steeling herself to address an anger she didn't understand without upsetting the delicate balancing act that kept him from destroying them both, and the rest of the world with them.

She said slowly, carefully, "I don't understand."

His mouth turned down, a sliver of tooth appearing between shadows as his patience began to fracture. Then the light extinguished, darkness twisting and bending around them nauseatingly as he dragged her into another jump, pulling her deeper into the curse. He wrenched her forward, cry trapped in her throat, when they emerged, twisting her arm behind her back and pinning her against him with it.

"You knew I would never follow you as far as you needed me to go," he hissed, breath hot on her cheek, "so you brought me face to face with the one thing that would be enough torture to make me change my mind!"

The dark swerved, and she braced her free hand on his tunic, both to keep him at bay and to keep from falling over. Power was rising in him, humming along the seam between them like an electric current, and her heart jack-knifed in her throat. She was too weak to contain him if he turned on her now.

"Link," she panted, blind, grasping desperately at his sense of reason, "I don't know what you're talking about!"

His grip on her wrist tightened, pressing her flush against him with it, and her breath stilled.

"Don't," he breathed, bringing his mouth over her ear, "test me."

She closed her eyes, insides clenching, and offered a silent prayer to the goddess for strength. She couldn't contain him again. She couldn't run. She didn't know if she could reach the Sword if she tried. So she did the opposite. Instead of fighting him, instead of pushing him away or running or giving in to the plethora of other instincts making her blood pound, she held the fear close, accepted it for the inevitability it was and embraced the choices that had brought her there. She leaned into him, trembling, following the line of his cheekbone with hers until she mirrored him, breathing words into his ear, and laid a crumb of logic like an offering.

"Why? Why would I do that?" She swallowed reflexively, eyes darting blindly in the dark as she listened for an answer. "Why would I risk angering you now, when we're so close to answers?"

He was silent for a long time, and still. His grip softened. Their faces still touched, his breath fanning across the edge of her neck. It was almost as if he was lingering. It was almost an embrace.

"You don't even realize," he decided finally, his voice little more than a whisper, and loosed a sardonic breath. "You're as helpless as I am."

He let his hands fall, but didn't step away, or try to pry her fist off his tunic. She exhaled tremulously as his anger ebbed, relieved, pressing her face into his throat while her pulse calmed. He let her, his mind still turning over whatever he had seen, whatever he had sensed. They stayed like that, motionless and unseen and forgotten, as though they were part of the ruins themselves, surrounded by the echoes of her breath and heartbeat.

Eventually the adrenaline started to wane and her legs buckled. He caught her gingerly, easing her to the mossy floor as the darkness blotched and swam, and she let out a long breath, letting him; she had used more magic in the last day than she ever dared before, and the last jump had depleted what little was left over—intentionally, she realized numbly. It had effectively rendered her helpless. She shivered miserably, teeth chattering, as he let her go, succumbing to chills as her body began feeding on itself to replenish its energy reserves.

Fingertips splayed against hers as he crouched nearby, a knee brushed her elbow. Only the tiniest indicators that he still existed somewhere in the darkness. Then he slid his hand behind her ear, its usual iciness replaced by an unexpected warmth, and gently lent her power. Her eyes fluttered closed as she leaned into the siphon, an oscillating cord of warmth and energy unspooling down her neck and into her ribs, heating her from the inside out like a bowl of hot soup, and a soft sigh escaped her lips.

"This," she whispered, going boneless, "this would've been useful earlier."

"It's not very efficient."

She pondered that for a half a second, his outburst at the mouth of the woods and the countless jumps he had initiated since, before she decided, "You're tired."

"Yes. But you need it more than I do."

She wasn't about to argue, though it registered dimly, someplace, that she probably should. She reached up to cover his hand with hers instead, keeping it close. The tremors were quieting, reduced to broken shivers. She ground her jaw, fisted her hands in the moss, grasping after the unexpected kindness. She said, "Thank you."

He grunted an acknowledgment, shifting his hand further down her neck. The pad of his thumb shifted over her pulse, feeling after the gentle rise and give under her skin. She swallowed, measuring her heartbeat with him. It sped when she thought of his anger. It galloped when she considered asking him about it. It felt ready to burst out of her when she decided she would try. He had to have felt it, but gave no indication he noticed.

She murmured, finally, wetting her lips apprehensively as she dared to breach the silence, "Are you going to tell me what got you so angry?"

The heat didn't slacken, though the muscles running through his wrist flexed, as though to pull away, or perhaps tighten his grip around her throat. He waited for a long time, so long she thought he might never reply, feeding her energy in lieu of answering.

He finally said, "This curse isn't what I expected."

"What were you expecting?"

"Something nameless."

She lost the nerve to question him, stonewalled twice by his ambiguity and not stupid enough to assume it was coincidence. She tried to empty her mind, revel in the warmth and the pleasantness of the energy instead, and right when she decided she was at peace with the mystery of it, he spoke again.

"Do you know how curses are born?"

Something about his quietness, the delicacy with which he asked, gave her pause. He wasn't telling her because she had asked. He was telling her because he wanted to. She shifted, answered, "No."

"Not many do," he admitted dryly. "They think it's all anger and sorcery. And there is a magical component. But it's much more to do with emotion—with a feeling."

If it weren't for the warmth of the siphon, she might have felt suddenly cold. He was picking through words as though the wrong one might splinter the darkness or break the ground open beneath them. Everything he said was usually so harsh and precise, delivered without thought for consequence; the great care he was taking now was enough to make her own confidence wilt.

Finally, she whispered, "I don't know much about curses."

"Somehow that doesn't surprise me." His thumb moved off her pulse, running along the ribbing of her windpipe to the hollow of her throat. His fingers spread closer to her shoulder, and she couldn't suppress the shudder that moved out of her at the rush of heat. "Better?"

For a breathless, aching moment, she couldn't answer, steeped in a memory of that same touch, traveling with painful slowness along a bare shoulder, down her arm, enclosing a wrist before lips planted a soft kiss to the underside of it. She swallowed, managed, voiceless, "Better."

There was another wave of silence as he rummaged through history and magic and lore, through forgotten ages and secrets so old even the sages had lost track of them. Finally, he murmured, "Curses are… elegant, in a way. They never age. They can't starve. They're malleable, always adapting. Always finding ways to survive. Anchored to the world by the memory of something that doesn't exist anymore." She could hear the frown on his voice as he added, "It's what makes us so difficult to kill."

His touch cooled, draining the last of the heat into her neck, and pulled away. She had to resist the urge to chase it. It was harder, facing the darkness without something tangible to assure her she wasn't alone. The bitter taste of stillwater seeped out of the ground, knitting with the cool, spongy sensations of dirt and moss under her fingernails to form an impression, the ghost of an image, of where they might be. More bogs, shrouded in darkness so ancient and pure she was beginning to forget what the sun looked like.

"Does it matter where they come from?" she muttered, bitterly, pulling her knees to her chest.

"Sometimes."

She ran her fingers across her scalp, staring through oblivion, trying to make heads or tails of him and coming up empty. Then he asked,

"Do you know where the Calamity comes from?"

She blinked into the dark, startled. The Calamity was as old as Hyrule, as old as her bloodline, as old as time itself, it seemed. For all her studies, all her sessions with priests and sages and the sacred texts, she couldn't say she truly understood its source. The realization pricked deep in her conscience, though she couldn't fathom why. She admitted, "No."

"Knowing where something comes from can help you understand it, help you destroy it. Or, at least, understand why it should be destroyed."

She frowned. "You don't have to worry about me backing out of my promise. I'll keep it. I don't need your persuasion."

"But you should know," he insisted quietly, and she pursed her lips, silenced. He was silent for a long moment, too, and when his voice finally came out of the darkness it seemed to come from someplace much older, someplace so ancient even his 10,000 years seemed inconsequential. "Long before Hyrule was, demons and gods shed each other's blood to lay claim to this land and the gifts the gods that created it had left behind. The hatred of one of them burned so brightly it transcended death and time, taking shape and drawing breath in whatever form it pleased—and always has, and always will, unless we stop it."

For just an instant she could've sworn she could see his eyes in the darkness, burning with their own light—fire and ice, man and beast, part lure and part warning, part savior and part curse, imploring her to understand the gravity and the nature of his beginnings. But the nothing never parted.

"That's how I was born," he finally said. "Emerging out of hatred the world had long forgotten, still slick with malice and blood, not knowing anything except a desire to consume."

She swallowed, trying not to picture it: a primal evil dragging itself from a festering womb, wearing the beautiful, elfin features of a man some part of her had loved millennia ago, twisted up in hatred.

"That's not who you are," she said.

"Isn't it?" he bit out, and then sighed. "You don't know the first thing about who I am."

"Yes, I do," she whispered, the words slipping rebelliously from her mouth before she could think better of them. But he didn't argue the point.

The curse loomed around them like a shell blotting out the world: quiet, listening, eavesdropping. And though she was sure he hadn't moved, he suddenly seemed very far away.

He murmured, "That was all a very long time ago."

She frowned, emboldened by his failure to punish her and by something else, something older and more resolute, something wiser that she wasn't sure was entirely her own. "That hatred doesn't define you. If it did, I would already be dead, and Hyrule would be burning."

He spared the energy to summon a tiny flare of light again, burning above the curve of his hand like an orb of tinder, and used its glow to look her over. His scrutiny was unnerving as ever, as though he was trying to riddle out if she was sane, or stupid, or edible, or perhaps parts of all three. The light caught on the burning filament in his irises, breathed on them as they coiled, serpentlike, like molten ore in the dark.

"Refraining from tearing your throat out doesn't make me less evil," he said levelly, slowly, spelling out a truth she didn't want to hear. "Just patient."

"That's not true."

"You're wrong. If you knew how badly I wanted to—"

He checked, quelling a sudden, transparent hunger. He swallowed down ire and thirst, reaching with a trembling hand to touch her mouth, and though she braced herself for the burn of it it still stole the breath from her lungs. She looked for his eyes in the light, but they were elusive, following the sweep of his finger as it trailed along the full curve of her lip. He was transfixed by the contact, by the reflexive part of her lips when she tried to breathe, and it made her blood simmer in more ways than one.

His touch was so cold it burned, so gentle it ached, so numbing she couldn't move—and it was a calculated, blistering reminder of what he was. He lingered until she trembled with him, until her heart constricted so tight in her chest she could hardly draw breath, until tears pricked at her eyes—the infuriating, frightened kind he could provoke at will. But she was beyond feeling ashamed of them. Instead of cowering she just let them fall, raising her chin in quiet defiance as they left glistening trails down to her jaw.

"Then what's stopping you?" she challenged.

He frowned, muttered bitterly, scathingly, "You are."

He dropped his hand and stood, pacing away like an animal trapped in a cage over the splash of marsh catching light beneath the mist, and she took a deprived, shuddering breath. Of all the contradictory, paralyzing responses...

"None of that matters," he growled before she could sort herself out, raking a hand frustratedly across his scalp. "It's not the point."

"What is, then?"

He turned, fuming, and bit out, "Why don't you ever think? See beyond yourself? I'm talking about where this curse came from!"

"How should I know?" she managed amidst a breathless, incredulous laugh. "This curse is as old as anyone can remember, and the only hatred we've ever been taught to fear is yours!"

"Not hatred," he corrected her tautly, jaw clenching sporadically around the words. "It would've been so much easier if it was."

She sighed, frustrated by his opacity, and got to her feet, wrapping her arms around herself as she moved closer.

"I don't understand."

"I know you don't," he breathed, dragging a hand over his face, his frustration suddenly melting into resignation. He turned, eyes resting begrudgingly on her. "A curse is nothing but a feeling, lingering beyond its inception and given form by power. Emotion and magic. It's why I'm consumed with hatred. It's literally what I am."

Her mouth twisted again at his oversimplified origins, but she resisted the urge to argue. She could feel him coming undone, dredging truths he could hardly admit to himself out of depths too nebulous to chart.

"But this curse, this place—it's filled with disappointment, with unfulfilled promises." His teeth clenched around nothing, reflexively trying to keep the words in his throat. "With regret."

She froze as the implication settled, as the bitter memory of a decision she could never unmake welled up in her mind like tidewaters and the taste of that ancient sealing power flooded her mouth like bile. She loosed a shuddering breath and buried her face in one hand, overwhelmed by the rawness of it as it crashed over her again.

She whispered, "Oh, Goddesses."

"You told me in the Lost Woods that she died regretting what she did, but I—" he cut off, stopping to smother something desperate, something ancient, that threatened to boil over. "I didn't want to believe it. I survived those 10,000 years by telling myself that this was what she wanted. That I was fulfilling her last wish. And now—"

His frustrated growl tapered off into nothing. A silence, thick, noxious, churned in the wake of that revelation, she unable to conjure words and he unwilling, lingering so long it might have become a curse in itself. His Zelda's regret had lingered on the edge of her kingdom since her death, faceless, nameless, unexplored and unquestioned—and in her ignorance she had unwittingly led him headlong into it.

"I'm sorry," she whispered haltingly. "I didn't know."

"I know you didn't. She did."

She lifted her eyes to meet his miserably. He searched her face for a long time, sometimes seeing her, sometimes not. He turned, jaw set, obscured by shadow as he stared into darkness.

"It's time I rid myself of her," he decided huskily. "She's haunted me long enough."

Zelda watched helplessly, brow creased, as he held his hand out again, watching the mist pool haphazardly in his waiting palm, tasting the regret, feeling its form as he made to untangle it. Power built behind his eyes, trembling between them like heat.

She whispered, "What are you doing?"

He met her eyes for the briefest moment, unguarded and raw. He said,

"Lifting it."

And then the curse split open. The mist groaned and writhed like a great beast struck through its middle as darkness spiraled towards him, and she stumbled back, a scream catching in her throat as the gloom whipped around them, pulling at hair and cloth and stealing the air out of her mouth.

She could hardly breathe, winds bludgeoning her from every direction and snuffing out the fairylight. Twilight filtered through the imperfections in the darkness, alighting his form as the curse barreled towards it. His profile appeared in intermittent flashes: head tipped back, jaw clenched, figure quaking as the black vortexed into his chest. The sky bled through, the first of the evening stars, the sounds of burgeoning nighttime, the taste of fresh air sweeping down from the hills, as the groan escalated, turning hoarse, shrill, until it was grating as a scream.

And then, all at once, it was over.

Link stumbled, shaking, his hand clutched over his chest where the mist had plunged into him, but when she tried to go to him he held out his other hand to keep her at bay. She waited in anxious, brittle silence, only vaguely aware of the surrounding ruins, no longer shrouded in darkness. His eyes fixed on her. They crackled with glowing filament and old fury.

She wet her throat, frowning gently at him. "Are you all right?"

"Not really," he admitted, and then promptly changed the subject. "You recognize it?"

She scanned the ruins as a wind swept down from the hills and tousled its remains with the first gust of fresh air in centuries, her lips pressed into a line. The stone was cracked and ribbed with age, half-sunk into marshland and mottled with moss. The trees were leafless and rotted. Overgrowth obscured the columns and monuments beyond recognition. It felt familiar, but only insofar as she might feel a vague familiarity with a smell or a taste. It was just there, and yet always out of reach, like trying to remember a dream.

She sighed. "Not really."

He righted himself, panting, and gave the ruins a cursory once over. He took a seat on a downed pillar; after dithering a moment she joined him, at a loss for what else to do. They were quiet, absorbing a sight the world hadn't seen for thousands of years.

She glanced at him sidelong, worried what effect lifting the curse might've had on him. His hands were still shaking. He was waiting, she realized. Waiting for her to make the next move. But she didn't know where to begin. Even with the curse gone, nothing triggered her memory.

Her fingers bit at the rock. It felt like a dead end.

"There has to be something," she whispered, and he shifted forward pensively, pressing his mouth into his hands.

"When you said she spoke to you, told you to come here, I honestly wasn't sure I believed you," he said after a while. "It's clearly not a coincidence that we came to this place, but it might not be for the reasons you thought."

She studied him a moment and decided, "You still don't think there's answers here."

"No, I don't," he murmured. "Not the ones you want."

"Then what was all this for? Would she really lure us all this way just to torment you with something you can't change?"

"She brought us here because she knew I wouldn't be able to deny her," he countered, and her brow puckered. "I wouldn't have followed you anymore, Zelda, not if the choice was mine. But confronted with this, with her regret—"

He didn't finish, and he didn't have to. She nodded, averting her eyes. "I know."

He paused, jaw clenched, his aversion to discussing that part of his past with her etched in the grim lines of his face. "The solution you want isn't here. Wherever this is going, wherever this leads, there's a journey ahead of us yet. She knew that. And she knew I wouldn't follow without persuasion."

He tilted his head back in the ensuing quiet to stare at the stars unfurling in the sky above, sighing, and she did her best not to squirm, feeling thrown into places she didn't belong, intruding on his privacy in the worst possible way. He was whispering, she realized at length, a prayer or a curse in ancient Hylian spilling clandestinely out of his mouth as he resigned himself to his fate: tugged and pulled by marionette strings, both tied and held by a divine being he had found himself in love with so long ago.

"You were right," he finally murmured. "This was what she wanted. For me to follow you, as I once followed her."

Her heart squeezed. This was all so far beyond her—beyond the scope of her training, beyond the bounds of her meager life experience, beyond what she could have ever imagined this conflict would become. And the worst part was she was fooling no one. He knew how little she understood better than anyone.

His jaw spasmed again, his two halves warring, eyes burning as whatever chaos was churning in his head began to sort itself out.

"I'm not what I once was," he murmured at length. "I don't know what value it will have coming from a demon. But I can't change that, and I can't change what she wanted. So, for what it's worth…" His hands fisted on his knees, then opened, holding nothing. Bereft. "I swear myself to you."

Her gaze darted back to his, lips falling apart. She whispered, weighed down by a sudden rush of guilt, "You don't have to do that."

"Who else am I going to serve?" he demanded. "Myself?"

"That's not—"

"Are you rejecting me?"

"What—No!"

"Then leave it alone," he growled.

She bit her cheek and folded her arms, feeling as inadequate as she ever had. He only lapsed into a nettled silence.

Finally she scoffed, incredulous, "This cannot be the only reason we're here."

He bared a sliver of tooth at her. "Do you take that oath so lightly?"

"No!" she blurted, mortified, and then dragged both hands down her face. "But we couldn't have come all this way just so you could swear yourself to someone who has no idea how to save you. It doesn't make any sense."

He frowned, working the problem over in his mind.

"This place has been cursed since she died," he recounted. "There's nothing here now that wasn't there then. And there was no way to undo something like this. Not here. Not anywhere in Hyrule."

She looked over the ruins again, willing herself to remember some detail, be struck with some flicker of inspiration, that might be the key. But it was as alien as ever.

For the first time, she allowed herself to doubt. Maybe there wasn't an answer here anymore. Maybe there never was.

"Why would she do this?" she whispered, hopeless, but he scoffed at her.

"Zelda, she's been dead for 10,000 years. She doesn't exist anymore, except in your subconscious. All that's left of her is here," he said, planting two fingers against her forehead. "Everything that's happened, everything you think she's said or she's done, has ultimately come from your own mind. She didn't lead us here. You did."

Her throat closed, and she suddenly found herself very close to the precipice of tears again. She swallowed them down with great effort, her insides trembling.

"But—" she began, but had no way to defend herself.

Had she really been so blind?

She turned to hide her face behind a curtain of hair, wishing Hyrule would just split under her feet and swallow her whole. If that was true, then it meant she had conjured all of this. She had fallen victim to her own memories, her own magic, never questioning the validity of it. It meant he was right about her. He always had been. She was young and inexperienced and stupid, wielding power she didn't understand and couldn't control, burdened with all the responsibilities and consequences of a decision she hadn't even made and that she didn't know how to begin coping with.

She took a hasty breath, trying to swallow down a sob, and got to her feet—to run, maybe, though she couldn't say where. His hand shot out, trapping her wrist before she could get too far away, and stood after her. The recoil brought her back to him, eyes and face red and shimmering, lips trembling and tasting of salt.

"Just when I think you're beginning to understand, you always prove me wrong," he said, mouth twisting humorlessly. He brushed tears from her jaw as she shrunk out from his scrutiny, and she begrudgingly met his eyes. "Why do you always fear what makes you who you are?"

She sniffled in spite of herself. "Because I can't control it. I only make things worse."

"You'll never learn to control it if you keep running away from it." He thumbed at another tear, frowning thoughtfully, and her face crumpled tighter. "You can't change what you are, Zelda, any more than I can."

She sniffled again, dragging her free wrist across her face as her mind tumbled over itself, over bits of logic and possibilities that snagged at her thoughts like raised rootstock on a footpath, and her muscle eased gently.

"If everything that led us here is in my mind," she posed slowly, blinking away blurriness, "then are you telling me the answers are there, too?"

His mouth twitched, eyes twinkling softly as though he wanted to smile. "Only you know the answer to that."

"Then come with me," she said, breathless, spiraling towards hope. "If the answer is somewhere in my memories—"

But what hint of a smile there was in his eyes vanished, his voice dropping acidly. "You'll forgive me if I'm not eager to follow you there again."

"You said you would swear yourself to me," she argued, and his eyes narrowed.

"Only you would be so quick to use that against me."

"And what good is that word if you won't follow me where I have to go?" she demanded, and his gaze shuttered. She chanced, hoping his resolve was weakening, "Please?"

He clenched the muscles in his jaw, cornered, and she mirrored him, refusing to back down. After a long moment he finally moved, pulling them both back to sit on the pillar.

"I'll bridge our minds," he iterated, facing her squarely, "I'll guide the memories."

She nodded, swallowing, nerves in a sudden jumble. She hadn't missed the warning in his voice. It was not a concession he made lightly, and if she overstepped her bounds again there would be consequences, one way or another.

He reached out with both hands, sighing out his nose, and touched her mind.

The ruins morphed around them, damage and age filling out again and the pale spattering of moonlight giving way to diffused orange sunbeams. The trees dripped blossom petals; they drifted lazily in the afternoon warmth, trickling with an eerie steadiness. Like grains of sand falling through the neck of an hourglass. A woman knelt beneath them with her knight protector, her eyes glazed over with a ghostly vacancy, feeling things, seeing things, that were not of that world.

"He's getting stronger all the time," she said, splaying her fingers in the grass beneath her unconsciously, as though she were feeling after tremors in the earth. "I always sense him now. I think he can sense me, too."

Her knight frowned, but didn't budge from his place guarding her, dutifully holding his broadsword, planted tip down at his feet. "How long? Months? Weeks?"

"Days," she corrected, with chilling certainty. "His hunger is driving him now."

He gripped the hilt tighter, every nerve in his body burning with the desire to shield her from that, to take the burden of that evil off her shoulders. But it wasn't his place. He glanced down at her, at her pale, unseeing eyes. He gripped it harder until his knuckles turned white.

She reached over blindly, her hand resting on his calf, on the leather of his boot, and a sad smile played on her lips. "I'm glad we were able to come here one last time."

He scanned the ruins for the umpteenth time for signs of danger. For signs of anyone at all. The Sheikah monks had scattered as soon as they had arrived, and hadn't reappeared since. They were alone. He knelt beside her and leaned in closer, but then lost his nerve, throat bobbing as he swallowed.

He promised, voice trembling, "We can stay as long as you want."

Zelda loosed a breath harbored too long, knots spreading through her chest and stomach. She was hardly aware of herself at all until Link's hand closed like a vice over her wrist, startling her out of her reverie, his eyes burning with orange coils that gleamed hot against the afternoon sun.

"Focus," he growled. "Don't forget what we came here for."

She nodded weakly, letting him pull her forward. The dream melted away like dust caught up in rainwater. They were moving upstream through memories, through time, the illusory ruins filling with their duplicates reliving a dozen moments. She saw them caught in a sudden rain, breathless, laughing, fingers intertwining hesitantly in the stolen solitude and the contact so rare it felt to both of them that it might ignite. She saw the gentle smile she gave him when they were in public, a polite show of gratitude that masked a much deeper affection and that he could see right through. She saw the strained silence between them, the artificial distance, that seemed to spawn out of nothing, but that meant everything. She saw them taking shelter behind one of the stone dragons, fighting an argument that had them both nearly in tears—an argument they were both losing.

Zelda looked away, breath stolen, overwhelmed by the onslaught of borrowed emotion, turning, wandering aimlessly for relief, when Link found both her wrists again.

"Zelda, focus!"

"I can't breathe!" she cried, tears budding in her eyes as she tried to sort through the longing and agony of another lifetime. "I feel everything she felt, and I hurts to look at it anymore, and I—"

She pressed her mouth into her hand, quelling the rest. To her surprise, that actually gave him pause. His expression softened, even if just a little, and with an unpleasant, sodden knot in her throat, she realized it was empathy. Because he was feeling it, too.

"Do you want to stop?"

"No," she warbled. "Not until we get what we came for."

"It might not exist," he reminded her, and she nodded once, tensely.

"Keep going."

He nodded and pulled her forward again, guiding her through moments that tumbled by in waves, filtering through her fingers like water or sunlight. Time lost its meaning altogether eventually, blurring around them as seconds bled into minutes and then hours, or days, or years, or eons. In some ways she felt blind, stumbling aimlessly through history without ambition or direction. But at the same time she knew she was getting closer to what she wanted; she could feel it, like heat from a fire brushing softly against an outstretched hand, and moved unwittingly towards it.

She saw the ruins, encircling them, shrouding them in secret, blotting out the rest of the world as they worked to shield the kingdom from destruction. She saw the monks, always ready to do Hylia's bidding, always seeking her sight, always weaving the tapestry of Hyrule's history into their collective memory as a means to foretell the future. She saw the blue-eyed version of herself and her knight, younger and less experienced—just as devoted to each other, but less sure, less familiar, less wise, puzzling out their destiny and leaning on one another for strength.

Zelda had to admit she longed for that, for companionship deeper than what her champions, or even a lover, could give: the fellowship that could only come from someone who shared the same fate.

Then she saw them resting beneath dogwood trees, so early on, before they had let things get so complicated.

 _Do you ever wonder what you'll do… afterward?_

Link was about to pull her forward again, lift her consciousness out of the scene and plant it somewhere else, but she fought him, latching onto the unexpected familiarity of the image.

"Wait," she breathed, watching the peace and their innocence amidst the pillars and monuments, and he furrowed his brow at her. "I've seen this before. That was here?"

He frowned, glancing at the memory of his past self with barely disguised disdain. "What of it?"

 _Have you heard about Maz's latest invention?_

"A shrine," she murmured, not taking her eyes off the spot where, beneath the dogwoods and oaks, a princess of Hyrule had once sat with its Hero and tried in vain to ignore an approaching catastrophe. "She said he was building a new type of shrine."

The vision ended, blurring into dappled colors and sunlight. He didn't answer, his gaze sliding away again, shifting, searching, as he digested her words. Then they stilled, fixed on some mundane place near his boots, and she stepped closer.

"You know what that means," she urged him softly, "don't you?"

He held her gaze, begrudgingly, tethered, before he said, his voice nearly as quiet, "It was just a prototype."

"It was here? In Thyphlo?"

"No, of course not," he murmured. "It was on the Great Plateau."

"Link," she breathed, relieved and exasperated at once. "If there's even a chance—don't you see? A shrine with that kind of power? It could purge the Calamity from you!"

His eyes, dark, troubled, flickered up to hers, surprised. Then they shifted, slipping again out of darkness, out of uncertainty, back into tired, practiced armor.

"Do you realize what you're asking of me?" he finally demanded. "Another journey, straight into the heart of Hyrule?"

"I know we can do this," she told him, but he scoffed darkly.

He countered, so quietly it felt wrong to argue, "You know less than you think."

Her heart sank, her enthusiasm tempered by the realization that no matter how promising a solution was she couldn't force him to reach out and take it. She took a meaningful step forward, steeling herself with a gentle breath.

"Will you come with me?"

He made to answer, but then his eyes unfocused, leaving him eerily vacant, and he took a stiff, slow breath.

He murmured, "We're not alone."

She felt it then, something corporeal, a touch, skin on skin, and it was so foreign after so long in her mind that she gasped aloud. Panic shot through her heart, realizing they were seconds from leaving this place, from facing something unknown, and she dove towards him, his name on her lips shattering the dream like iron impacting glass.

Her eyes fluttered open as their connection severed, as she snapped back into her own consciousness, her own self, her own body. Link was across from her, still sitting on the downed pillar, a glistening, rosy barrier between them and the gleam of a scimitar catching firelight at his neck.

The champions had found them, and they weren't taking any chances.

Daruk had broadened his spell, encasing her in its humming shell. Mipha and Revali were on either side, weapons aimed at his heart at point-blank range. And Urbosa had his head angled up by his hair, the Sword of the Seven poised to draw a deathstroke across his throat.

"Talk fast," she advised as his eyes drew into focus. "Or I take off your head this time."

He glared witheringly, but didn't deign to answer, his gaze sliding back to Zelda.

"They're more loyal to you than you know," he hissed out of clenched teeth, rage boiling, barely harnessed, through his veins. "They know I could kill them with a breath if I wanted to."

She pounded a fist on the barrier, heart galloping, dizzy with fear, as the taste of old magic swirled around her like a cloud: vibrations of thunder and wind and molten rock, the cooling sensation of water, the jarring, metallic presence of malice, all piercing her teeth and turning the edges of her vision white and threatening to devour each other.

"Let me go," she gasped, eyes watering. "Let me go!"

"Who are you?" Urbosa demanded, angling the blade deeper. "What have you done to her?"

He ignored her again, harnessing Zelda's eyes. The coils pulsed and undulated against the ice beneath, steady as a heartbeat. And for a brief, breathtaking moment, she saw something there beyond her wildest imaginings, something old and familiar and heartrendingly undeserved.

Trust.

"Stop panicking," he guided her quietly. "Your magic is stronger than theirs."

His voice led her as it had, she realized numbly, so many times before. She opened her fist, feeling the spell's ancient composition on her fingertips, the flinty, fiery roots of it, birthed of mountains and belonging to mountains. It was nothing like her power, all brilliant, searing light and stardust. She summoned it, just for a moment, pitting it against the barrier, earth and heat against sunbeams and starfire.

It shattered. Behind her, Daruk grunted, stumbling back as his power splintered and ricocheted. She could feel the residue of her own power running off her body, radiating from her skin, from her eyes, in a golden glow.

She mustered the courage to meet their eyes—owlish, churning with disbelief and no little fear. Link's were impassive, watching her come into herself and into her power with so little reaction it could only have been expected.

And she couldn't look away. She drank strength from his constancy, his immovability, like it was second nature. Like it was an addiction.

"Let him go, Urbosa," she whispered, finally, "and I'll tell you everything."


	9. Hunger

_A/N: Ok, so first of all, I have some MAJOR issues with the opening to this chapter, which is essentially the introduction for the Champions. Basically, it sucks. But I'm tired of sitting on these NINE THOUSAND PLUS WORDS, and of trying to throw together half-baked solutions, so I'm just going to put this chapter up here so you guys can read it, such as it is, and I can move on with my life. Someday I'll come back and do a total rewrite of the first third of this and some other parts that I think have horrible pacing, but as those problems don't really impact the story at all other than being very weak sections, I think I can live with that._

 _Thank you guys SO MUCH for your reviews and for your patience, you are, as always, the absolute best! So, without further ado..._

 _*Throws chapter at screen, sending pages flying everywhere*_

 _*Runs away, arms flailing*_

 **Hunger**

Zelda sat, bathed in sunlight, at Thyphlo's edge. The waterways had already begun to heal in the absence of the curse, the long-dormant moat and putrid mudpots feeding off their old aquifers until, once in a great while, clear water in amongst the clouds of silt would catch light and reflect it back in brilliant diamond shapes.

It was really quite amazing how much had changed overnight.

Mipha and Revali had gone to fish at Lake Mekar, where 10,000 years of decay hadn't made the waters uninhabitable, and Daruk and Urbosa had stayed behind—ostensibly to protect her, though she suspected it had more to do with keeping her company than anything.

She resisted the urge to look back at the ruins looming over her shoulder, where the Calamity had stalked off hours ago and had yet to return.

Link hadn't let her explain until she had been fed and given something to drink, but once her needs were met and she was allowed, convincing the others of his true identity hadn't been as difficult as she had feared—due in no small part to the sacred sword slung across his back, though all told it hadn't done much to ease tensions between them. They didn't trust him, and he wasn't particularly inclined to keep them alive. Which he mentioned. Several times.

Her shoulders sagged. She wanted to be angry with him for being difficult. But he was what he was, and expecting him to be anything else didn't make her an optimist. It just made her stupid.

Urbosa left the cooking fire she was tending and sauntered closer, summoned, it seemed, by her negative energy. She had a knack for being exactly where Zelda needed her to be precisely when she needed her to be there. A Gerudo's legendary intuition, she would've called it. Sometimes Zelda suspected it was just written all over her face, and it was merely a matter of being observant and invested.

She planted a hand on her hip and looked over the hills. Then she looked at her, warm eyes pensive and a thoughtful smile curving her cobalt lips. "You've changed, princess."

Zelda grimaced. "Have I?"

"You're stronger."

"I know," she murmured, mouth twisting. "Sometimes when I use that power I don't feel like myself anymore. Like a stranger in my own body."

"Well," she amended, squinting into the light as she joined her on the ground, "that wasn't exactly what I meant."

A gust of wind blew stiffly from the west down the hills, stifling conversation as it pulled at hair and cloth and carried into the ruins, rattling leaves and churning dust as it went, coaxing them back to life with ardent breath as though they were a half-dead ember. Somewhere in those ruins, the wind was raking over the Calamity, pulling at him with as much success as it did the carved stones he walked amongst. She dug her fingers into the moss and didn't turn around.

Urbosa clarified, when she forgot to answer, "I meant you're more resilient."

Zelda sighed without meaning to, and Daruk, his massive brow furrowed, cleared his throat and ambled perceptively away from the cooking fire and out of earshot, mumbling something about quarrying a decent lunch.

"I don't feel like it," she whispered, once they were alone. "It feels like I'm coming apart at the seams."

Urbosa was quiet a moment, cushioning her counsel, watching her with eyes that were fierce and gentle at once. "Have you considered that he might be right?"

Zelda's mouth twisted again. "I can't explain it to you, Urbosa. I know who he is and I've seen what he's done, and if I don't—" she stopped short, sighing into the air. "If I didn't at least try to save him, I could never live with myself."

 _Try_ , she had to amend, because there was no guarantee this would work. But the truth was she didn't know what she would do with herself if it didn't.

The memories surfacing in her brain were coming more vibrantly since the curse had lifted, triggered, it seemed, by tapping deeper into her powers, or perhaps by the influx of memories Link had exposed her to while they were telepathically connected. There were still plenty of holes, leaving her with more questions than answers, but the emotional investment in those memories was stronger than it had ever been.

Urbosa smiled again at her, reaching over to tame a matted, unruly wave of hair that didn't want to sit behind her ear, but it was a sad smile. "There's a fine line between passion and stubbornness, Little Bird," she said, "and you're walking it."

"What choice do I have?" she murmured, but Urbosa wasn't moved.

"He was the Hero once, and he made his decision long before any of us were even born," she reminded her, looking for evasive eyes. "He's ready to give his life for Hyrule."

"I know he is. But I'm not."

Urbosa pressed her lips into a thin line, but she didn't force the issue. Something warm, something maternal, had seeped through her diamond-tough exterior, moving her against her better judgment. Finally, she decided, "You need to eat."

Zelda nodded, rising to move closer to the fire and grateful for the change of subject. She'd already been wrestling with Link over his own demise for days—and though it came as no surprise that the Champions sided with him on the issue, it was draining to have to hold her ground against all of them at once.

They didn't understand. How could they? They hadn't felt his soul fracture beneath lithe fingertips, splintered into a thousand tortured pieces that she could weave with threads of hate and malice, hadn't felt him strung on her needle and pulled taut to snap as she cross stitched what was left of him back together into some mutilated, unconscionable mockery of what he had been in the name of divine providence. A Goddess, playing with her embroidery.

She trembled as the memory drained. They feared him, what he was capable of, when the one they should have been fearing was her.

The unmistakable silhouette of a Rito streaked overhead, wings spread wide as it circled the ruins, and Mipha marched up the ridge not far behind. She joined them at the cooking fire without preamble, immediately setting about skewering their catch, her fair features drawn with concentration. She was naturally soft spoken, but her silence was distinctly artificial. The result of the revelatory deluge the night before, probably. Zelda wanted to say something—thank her for the food, or reassure her somehow—but she couldn't find the words.

Revali touched down a few moments later, beak tugged down into a frown. The feathers at his neck puffed aggravatedly, betraying what might otherwise have appeared to be a cool exterior. He was least happy of all with… well, everything.

Urbosa reached to turn the spit without turning to acknowledge him. "Well?"

"Still skulking," he murmured, and then tilted his head towards Zelda, eyes glittering with impatience. "Quite the paladin, your hero."

Urbosa arched an unamused brow at him, but Zelda ignored the jab, fixating instead of the promise of a hot meal. Hunger was so simple, so easily remedied, compared to other torments.

They waited in stilted silence, listening to scales sizzle and staring through plumes of smoke.

"We should decide on a route," Urbosa said, finally, pulling a skewer off the fire when it was done and handing it to Zelda. "The Great Plateau isn't exactly isolated."

She picked at her trout, frowning. There was no question in their minds that they would take the journey with her, despite the danger. She had fallen into her restless sleep the night before trying to convince herself that it was for the best that they be left behind. But the truth was she wanted them with her. They couldn't compete with Link's magic, or even her own, but their companionship meant warmth and compassion and support, and she was beyond starved for all three.

She frowned privately, weighing the consequences. Link would _hate_ it.

"We could take the road through Rowan Plain," Mipha suggested, and Revali cocked his head in reluctant acknowledgement.

"It would keep us away from civilization," he murmured, frowning at his fish. "Keep the collateral damage to a minimum."

Zelda nodded, sighing; her Rito Champion certainly had a knack for phrasing the truth in the ugliest way possible.

"What about him?" Urbosa murmured, glancing back through the marsh as she pulled another skewer off the fire.

"He doesn't eat," Zelda murmured, refusing to follow her gaze, and Revali made a pleased noise in his throat, swallowing down a mouthful.

"Finally," he intoned, just as Daruk rejoined them, the crook of his arm full of foraged rocks, "a redeeming quality."

"There's nuthin' redeeming about not eating," he murmured, munching pensively on a boulder the size of his fist.

He settled cross-legged beside them, his massive brow furrowed with wrinkles deep as the ridges lining the Eldin Foothills. Even disturbed, Daruk radiated a certitude that could lift others' spirits. Zelda tried to smile at him, but it felt tight across her mouth.

Sitting around that little fire, surrounded by her Champions, by their warmth, Zelda suddenly realized how very, very cold she had been the last few days. She never wanted to be that cold again. She stared down at her half-eaten fish, trying to steel herself to confront Link with her plan, and within the span of a heartbeat her appetite was gone.

"We should leave soon," she murmured, setting the unfinished skewer down and excusing herself—quickly, before their sudden, rigid alarm and exchanged glances could produce an objection.

This was definitely a conversation the two of them were better off having in private.

She moved headlong back into the ruins, feeling after his presence with her senses. He wasn't terribly far, his shadow pulsing warmly as the vibrations of her perception pinged off his form. She snaked between massive, etched pillars and beneath the bared teeth of dragon heads, looming like great protectors along Thyphlo's rim and at its crossroads, and moved silently through the blind gaze of its bird-torches, watching out of hollow, lidless eyes and sitting stone-still amidst trees, columns, and altars like sentinels, stationed eons ago and never relieved.

Sometimes she could see it all as it was before—still old, still foreign—surrounded by a lush grove and constantly doted on by the Sheikah monks who had taken up residence there long after the great ancestors had moved on in search of new conquests, their marks left on a world that they would eventually forget, but that could never forget them. And the monks, swaddling themselves in the ancient energy and the peace of the natural world seeping from that place like a blanket, would listen for Hylia's whispers in the old stone and in the wind, letting her inspire them in new and wondrous ways and birthing, in those ethereal, connected moments, images of monumental beasts, aglow with azure fire and light, zealous to do the goddess's bidding.

Naturally, the princess with the Blood of the Goddess was always welcome there.

Zelda shivered, confronted again with the barrenness that had overtaken that place as the visions receded. There had been so much promise there, so much hope. So much ambition.

And it had all come to nothing.

Her feet shuffled to a standstill, her mind suddenly drawing too many parallels between those ruins and herself. Eyes scanned sprawling peat moss and ruins and ears replayed fervent arguments from the night before, a knot of fear tangling behind her ribs. Doubt whispered that her fate was as twisted as theirs had been, bound inescapably to the goddesses and their will but ultimately doomed to fail; whispered that her ambition, her hope, would come to nothing, leaving her as rotted, as haunted, as this place.

Link's voice echoed out of memory, tinged with a hint of a smile.

 _Since when does the princess of Hyrule give way to doubt?_

But that had been a different princess, and she was reasonably certain, if she asked him now, that he wouldn't have such words of encouragement for her. He would accuse her of endangering the entire kingdom for the sake of one man, remind her that their journey was an exercise in futility, and then hand her a broadsword and tell her, with eyes like ice and smelting copper, to drive it through his heart.

She brushed the image aside and forced herself to move on.

Several winding turns later she found him. He was sitting on the remains of a column, half-buried beneath a tree that, preserved somehow inside that curse for 10,000 years and against all odds, had begun sprouting new leaves already. His back was turned, but she knew he must have felt her coming long before she ever laid eyes on him. His voice, part wind and part stone, seemed to belong to the ruins themselves.

"Have you gotten rid of them?"

"No," she sighed, hugging her arms as she drew closer, "I haven't gotten rid of them."

The sweet smell of sunkissed earth and moss wafted up from beneath her feet as she moved, whispering gently that autumn was stirring awake, ready to renew that forgotten place with a proper rot. There was an inviting stillness in that heat, tempting her to join him in it rather than disturb it. And the temptation was strong. She was tired, and unmotivated, and he still hadn't acknowledged her even though she only stood a few feet away.

She chanced, quietly, "What are you doing?"

"Thinking."

Zelda lowered herself onto the lip of the makeshift bench, her posture slightly collapsed, and ran a hand across her scalp. She could guess what about. He had come face to face with the last, lingering remnants of the woman he loved yesterday, and then destroyed them for her.

He asked, suddenly, softly, "Did you dream?"

She blinked at him, addled, and nodded. "More than once."

"I've forgotten what it's like," he murmured, staring into the ruins, or perhaps through them, into another time. "But I think being trapped in your vision must have been close."

She tried to swallow, but her throat had closed. Had that only been yesterday? Only now, having experienced the turbulence of the memories he led her through the night before, could she begin to fathom what kind of torture waking up in that illusion, charged with so much remembered emotion, must have been.

"Dreams feel so real in the moment," he mused quietly, "and it isn't until later on, looking back, that you realize how ridiculous it all was."

She stared at her feet, voiceless, trying not to remember how tightly he had held her, how carefully, how desperately, he had drunk from her; trying not to remember the conflict scrawled across his face when he realized what she had done.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, swallowed again by the image of the untouchable, dispassionate goddess, playing with her needlepoint. "When I conjured that memory I didn't—" she faltered, closed her eyes. "I never meant to make you relive that."

He didn't answer for a long time. Then he murmured, "Yes, you did."

She looked up at him, surprised, miserable, but his gaze wasn't harsh.

"I was losing control, and the part of you that knew me best knew what it would take to stop me."

His eyes locked easily with hers. The coils in them turned, undulating rings of fire, always pulling her in, holding her still, whispering things she couldn't make out that struck fear and curiosity in her at once. They pulsed in mesmerizing tandem with her heartbeat.

She shook her head, breaking free of their spell long enough to respond. "I won't do that to you again. You have my word."

"Don't make promises you can't keep," he sighed, mouth turning down. "You have a harder time controlling your power than I do."

She frowned, wishing she could argue. But the truth was she hardly understood what she had done. Cornered by his logic, embittered by the empty sound of her own apologies, Zelda lapsed into another silence. The heat rose from the stone, from the earth, surrounding them with the woody scent of dried sphagnum. But he spoke before that alluring stillness could form again.

"You didn't come looking for me just to tell me that," he breathed. "What do you want?"

She reluctantly met his eyes. The pulse in them still mirrored the pulse in her chest. "I want to bring the Champions with us."

He tilted his head slowly, studying her, pulling at the unspoken threads encircling them both like a web until he seemed to know everything, _see_ everything, that she hadn't wanted him to see. It made her feel naked. "You're here to invoke my oath, then?"

She bit down on nothing, holding his gaze. Only he could turn so quiet a question into such a brutal accusation. "I'd rather not have to."

"I see."

His eyes never left hers, boring so deep into them and for so long that she could feel the glowing filament burn into her brain and alight it from within, turning everything inside her skull to ash. She whispered, "I wish you wouldn't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you expected this of me."

"How should I look at you?" he asked, and suddenly, feeling bare under his scrutiny, watching a quiet, insatiable hunger lurking in his eyes, she felt her face heat. But then his gaze narrowed in contempt, and as quickly as it had come the sensation was gone. "You can't expect me to not see what's right in front of me."

She mirrored his scornful gaze, stung, and rose sluggishly to her feet, turning with nowhere to go. The ruins stared back at her out of empty, sun-bleached eyes, and he rose behind her like a cold shadow at her back.

"I don't know what else to do with you," she finally admitted, whirling despairingly. "I can't control you. I can't reason with you. Does invoking an oath you gave me of your own volition really make me some kind of a monster?"

"The oath is yours to do with as you please," he conceded. " _I_ am yours. But you're a harsh mistress, Your Highness."

She swallowed thickly. When she found her voice, it wobbled. "Then I'll release you from it. Once this is over."

"And using that oath like a leash until then—is that something you learned on your own, or something remembered?" he asked levelly. "You've twice coerced me into obedience against my express wishes already, and it hasn't even been a day."

"I know that," she bit loudly, cornered, too many emotions stirring in her chest at once—the frustration, the guilt, the restless, ancient need for his constancy that she still didn't understand. "But I need them, Link, can you understand that? I can't—I _can't_ do this alone."

She trembled in the beat of silence that followed, chilled, suddenly, as though he had reached out and touched her. But he was remarkably still.

"Maybe you are a monster," he murmured, irises pulsing a hypnotic rhythm and drifting close enough that his proximity was beginning to make her head spin. "Maybe you're more like me than you want to admit."

Her brow scrunched. She tried, meagerly, "That's not—"

"The similarities are uncanny, really," he droned. "You manipulate others to get your way. Hurt them, if you have to. You put Hyrule in grave danger on a daily basis. And your power is completely out of control."

"You know I'm doing the best I can," she whispered, hurt. "That I'm trying to save you, before there's nothing left to save!"

"Yes, Zelda, I know exactly what you're trying to do," he sneered, eyes narrowing. "And let me give you a piece of advice, from one monster to another. The best intentions can come back to haunt you in the most debilitating ways."

And then he tore himself from her without a second glance, moving west through the heat of the marsh, and she shuddered where he left her, feeling hollow and torn to shreds. She turned, staring after him, seeing the Calamity, seeing a protector, seeing a man from a memory and his contradiction at once.

And she just couldn't leave well enough alone.

"Link, wait," she panted, pained, as she caught up to him. "What are you saying?"

"Exactly what it sounds like," he growled, sparing her a bitter glance, and she sighed at him, frustrated.

"I don't understand."

"No," he rumbled, moving so quickly through bog and ruin that she was stumbling to keep up, "you never do."

"Stop," she demanded, snatching him by the elbow, and he did, fixing her in a glare that nearly made the words lodge in her throat. "I know none of this has happened the way you wanted it to. I know you're afraid the Champions will set you off, that you're afraid of losing control. But you don't have to be. I can _prevent_ that—"

"Can you?" he cut her off, his volume so unexpected that she couldn't bring herself to finish. "Do you really think if I wasn't fighting with every fiber of my being to restrain that part of myself that I couldn't crush you?"

She swallowed, watching the monster stir restlessly in his eyes. He snatched his elbow away, leaving her hand grasping at nothing in the air between them and her mind grasping at a response. But there was nothing she could say to that.

"Believe it or not, I understand that you need them," he growled, holding his hand out in a taut gesture between them. "I do. You were never meant to do this alone. You were supposed to have a Hero by your side."

Her brow puckered, something buried in her soul renting in two. "Link, I didn't—"

"Let me finish," he insisted. "Those Champions are no substitute. And they may well endanger this whole, absolutely insane endeavor in ways you could never imagine. But I will do everything in my power to prevent that—for you, because I'm sworn to you. Do you understand that, at least?"

She stared at him for too long, heart trapped in her throat. For just an instant, like a burst of lightning casting a shadow, she saw the man separated from the beast, disfigured by hate and bound in armor but still very much alive, and understood who it was that she unwittingly harbored such loyalty towards. She nodded, curiously dispassionate. As far as epiphanies went, it left a rather bland aftertaste, as though some part of her had been aware of it all along, as she was of her own breathing, or her own heartbeat.

"Yes."

"Good."

He turned back to the path out of the marsh, and she didn't try to draw him out again. There was still so much hanging stale and unspoken in the air between them, but she was learning to live with it. Learning to accept that some things were better left unsaid.

Sometimes, suffering his stony silence and his unyielding pace, she thought he was running away from something.

When they emerged from the ruins, they found the camp dismantled and the supplies packed, and the Champions waiting for them in a variety of postures suggesting indignance. Even Mipha, usually so genteel, sitting with her trident planted tip down in the dirt, looked like a force to be reckoned with.

"Well, well," Revali sighed, exchanging a meaningful glance with Mipha as they crossed Thyphlo's edge into the remnants of the camp, "won't this just be terribly fun?"

"That's not the word I'd use, no," Zelda breathed, giving her hair an absent, weary tousle. "Are we ready to leave?"

"Ready, little princess," Daruk answered, perhaps a little too tenaciously, and earned himself a glare from Revali. He screwed his leathery lips sideways at him and shrugged.

She ignored the exchange; she was much more concerned with Link's oscillating mood than theirs, watching him stare them down out of her peripheral vision. "Good. I'd like to reach the West Plains by nightfall, and we're getting a late start as it is."

There was a beat where no one moved, she waiting for her orders to be enacted, and her Champions hesitant to turn their backs on the entity that had nearly destroyed them all not a week prior. Link finally broke the stand off, passing her an agitated glance as he moved between them all to take point and set the pace.

And, moving as unwaveringly as if it were an instinct, she followed him.

The others trailed into place behind her in a tight-lipped procession, strung together by the undercurrent of disgruntled silence emanating from the front of the line, and she stared at his back, processing. She would follow him to the ends of the earth, she realized, if he gave her a reason. It was like he was a magnet or an anchor, pulling her along wherever he liked. Was that influence residue from a memory, tethered to that deep-seated loyalty she had glimpsed in the ruins? Or was it something ingenuine, the result of some kind of manipulation on his part? She hated not knowing. She hated realizing the answer would make little difference.

An hour into their journey, as they descended Mount Drena into the Aldor Foothills, conversation was still stifled; but Urbosa had nudged herself close enough to Zelda to ask after her, and not for the first time since they had set off.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she murmured. Apparently her earlier attempts at nonchalance had been less than convincing, and when she opened her mouth to try again, Urbosa interrupted pertly, "Because you haven't stopped staring daggers at the back of his head since we left."

"It isn't his fault," she muttered, and Urbosa's lips twisted.

"You're quick to defend him."

She scoffed. "Well I have to be, don't I? You'd all take his head off if I turned my back."

"You don't give me enough credit. I'd ask your permission first."

"It would be one thing if you believed in this mission," she went on, ignoring her quip. "But as it is you're all only here because you serve me."

She arched a fiery brow at her, eyes drifting to the Calamity. "I think he's riding the same sand seal."

Zelda raked her hair back with both hands, holding it taut at the nape of her neck, and sighed. "It's complicated."

"Well you know what _I_ think," Revali horned in, wings crossed, and Urbosa rolled her eyes.

"Yes, we all know what you think."

"I think he's a ticking time bomb and this whole expedition is insane," he carried on anyway, and Zelda dropped her hair.

"Well, that makes at least two of you."

"I don't trust that Calamity as far as I can throw him," Daruk chimed in, "but we have faith in you, princess."

But she wasn't naive. Out of the corner of her eye Zelda caught Mipha turning away, obscuring her reaction, and in spite of her efforts to steel herself, her heart sank.

Of course they must have questioned her judgment. But did it run deeper than that? Had they begun to regret swearing themselves to follow her in the first place?

"That's kind of you, Daruk," she murmured, swallowing her fears. "Thank you."

"Do you?" Revali snorted, and she blinked at him, addled.

"Do I what?"

"Do you trust him?"

Zelda's tongue went numb in her mouth, tingling with the answer she wanted to give. Against all reason, against every warning he had ever given her, against every instinct in her body, yes, she trusted him. Not in the way she could trust them, of course, expecting their implicit honesty, sacrifice, and obedience. But insofar as his deepest motivations were concerned, she trusted that his loyalties lay entirely with her. But could she convey that to them? Did she even dare admit it aloud, when he might overhear?

"Are you finished?"

Link had appeared at her side before she could formulate an answer, frowning. She frowned, too. She wanted to snap back, push back for once, but the truth was their pace had slowed considerably. They were falling behind.

"We were _talking_."

"Yes," he growled, snatching up her hand in his before she could argue, "and I have full confidence in your ability to do that and _keep moving_ at the same time."

Zelda bit back the retort that bubbled to her lips, letting him drag her away as the others bristled. Picking a fight with him in front of them wasn't worth the potential fallout, even if he was making it tempting. Playing diplomat was tiresome enough as it was. Still, she was in no mood for his tyranny, and a glance backward at her friends, all of them staring daggers at the exchange, told her she had to do something.

"Would you stop?" she hissed under her breath. "I'm perfectly capable of traveling under the power of my own two feet."

"I wouldn't resort to dragging you along if you would use them."

"You're impossible to please," she breathed. "We weren't even talking for two minutes!"

"I think you've spent more than enough time clinging to your friends," he spat, and she blinked.

"Are you saying—" she began, and then backtracked, trying to appear less subversive. He would never admit to something as petty as jealousy. She licked dry lips, thinking. "Am I not giving you enough attention?"

"What I'm saying," he growled, giving her arm a firm tug, "is that if you can't keep up I'll put you under and _carry you_ the rest of the way."

She frowned, miffed. "And have to deal with the Champions yourself? I doubt it."

He glared. "Try it."

He clearly intended for that to be the end of the conversation. But she wasn't about to let him get away with it. She summoned a spark of sealing power in her palm, pitting it quietly against his grip, and he dropped her hand like it was a hot coal, stifling a hiss, and shot her a another glare. She raised her chin, daring him to complain, and he sighed at her.

"You've picked quite a time to be difficult, princess."

She arched a slender brow at him. "I could say the same."

"I am _always_ difficult. Don't pretend you didn't know that."

His voice was gravel, but his words brought a small, sympathetic smile to her face. The truth was the others weren't making it easy on him. And regardless of the complications that existed between them, she was the closest thing he had to a friend. She admitted, offering him the softer expression, "I did know that."

He examined her smile for a half-second and scowled.

They marched until sunset and set up camp in the plains sprawling behind Satori Mountain. Zelda started an effortless fire, lost in her own thoughts, and it wasn't until she looked up and noticed the others staring that she remembered they still didn't expect that sort of ability from her. The only person who did had wandered off, preferring a bit of isolation to the antagonism of the group.

Her Champions quickly saw to her needs, fixing a simple meal of fish from the river and scavenged herbs, and making sure she rehydrated, and finally relaxing enough to engage in some casual conversation. They managed to get her to laugh, even if quietly. Urbosa helped her untangle the week's worth of knots in her hair.

When Urbosa was finished and she could turn around again, Zelda realized Mipha was missing. She scanned the darkness and spotted her well outside the ring of the fire, her silhouette muted by the night and crouched beside the Calamity's. They must have been speaking—Zelda couldn't imagine Link would tolerate her presence for long if she didn't have something to say—but the distance, the rhythmic gurgle of the nearby river, and the crackling fire made it impossible to eavesdrop.

"What do you suppose that's all about?" Revali murmured, the disdain in his voice tempered by something else, something trapped between uncertainty and scorn, and Zelda couldn't find the words to answer.

Mipha's shadow moved, both hands moving to cup his face, and a gentle glow emanated from them, splashing them both in pale blue light. His eyes were closed, and as Zelda turned her back on the scene she felt a hollowness behind her ribs that she could not name.

She whispered, "It's probably nothing."

With the fire still roaring, she rolled onto her shoulder and tried to sleep. She was afraid of dreaming, of being plagued by nightmares where they couldn't reach the shrine in time and he transformed into some ravenous beast, or of being trapped in memories too intimate and painful to bear. She was just as afraid of staying awake, where the sudden discontent in her chest was churning her thoughts into a tumult.

When she finally slipped under, long after Mipha had returned to the group and they had divided the night watches, she was tormented by nightmares and memories in equal measure.

Later, when she stirred awake in the middle of the night, swept by a chill that belied the warm embers glowing beside her, she realized Link's unmistakable presence was missing.

She pushed herself up on her arms. Mipha was asleep—or rather put to sleep, a coppery, milky taste lifting from her supple form like a hazy aura. She reached for her perception, taking a calming breath before closing her eyes and sending a pulse in all directions. He wasn't far, ricocheting back as a thrum of bright shadow among the dull light of a cluster of oaks. She pursed her lips, torn, and then pulled herself away from the fire.

She moved towards the silhouette she had seen in her mind, through prairie grass and cold night wind, until she came upon the smattering of trees. Link's figure was little more than a blotch of deeper shadow amidst their shade, the hilt of his sword and the small, silver-blue hoops in his ears catching the scant light filtering through the leaves. But he didn't turn to acknowledge her as she entered the canopy, or give any indication that he sensed her approach at all, and that glaring lapse made her stomach twist.

Soon she was close enough to make him out. He was bent, one hand braced against a tree trunk and the other holding his ribs as though he were holding a wound. For a moment he was so still he seemed to have shed his body and left it there to become part of the forest—unmoving, ever watching, eaten by ivy and bleached by moonlight. She froze midstep, listening for whispers or breath. Then his face turned down, a haggard sound shuddering noisily out of him, lips falling apart as he panted, and she took a hesitant step forward.

His eyes sprang open, coils flaming as they found her, and he sneered, his gravel voice lacking its usual bite, "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you," she admitted, narrowing her eyes in a feeble attempt to make him out better as she approached. His silhouette didn't get any brighter for lack of distance. If anything, he seemed to grow darker, less clear, fading further into shadow. His eyes disappeared again, their glow vanishing with a turn of his head, and suddenly he seemed even farther away than before.

His hand dug deeper into his side for a long, breathless moment, and then he gulped air and growled, " _Go away_."

She did the opposite—which shouldn't have surprised either of them, really—drawn in by that harsh snap of anger that should have sent her running. A quick assessment revealed what she had already begun to suspect: the sheen of sweat on his forehead, his shallow breaths, the muscles seizing in his neck and face as he tried to school his expression—all telltale signs of a pain he couldn't quite mask.

"Link," she insisted—or pleaded, or demanded, or begged, hardly aware of her own voice, of its gentle warble on his name—"tell me what's wrong."

"It's nothing I can't deal with _alone_ ," he snarled, turning to face her squarely as his patience waned, the simple gesture making him seem more dangerous than before. "Now _sleep_."

Magic dragged itself across her mind like a curtain, the worn, familiar conjuring he had used so many times before, and her legs buckled. But she pushed back with the last precious flutterings of consciousness, catching herself woozily on an oak tree as she breached the frothy surface of the spell, and he frowned, quickly summoning it over her again like the crash of a wave.

"Stop it," she gasped, breathlessly breaking through the tumult a second time. "And yes, I'm invoking your oath!"

He turned, resigned, his face suddenly wan and lined with exhaustion, and backed against a tree, puffing a humorless laugh as he slid towards its base. "Well. At least you're admitting it."

She breathed deep, willing the numb tingle of the magic away as he settled where he had landed, eyes closed and arm braced again across his middle. She left the security of her support unsteadily, kneeling beside him with all the surety of a baby fawn.

"Now, are you going to tell me what's wrong of your own volition," she panted, her vision finally beginning to clear, "or do I have to order it out of you?"

He opened one eye halfway to glare at her, and then sighed, shifting gingerly. "I'd forgotten this."

"What?"

"That swearing yourself to a woman is hell."

Her mouth twisted, nearly put off. But she was nothing if not persistent. "Is it an injury? My healing abilities are nothing next to Mipha's, but I can at least—"

" _Just—_ " he broke off suddenly, spine arching and teeth clenching as he rode another swell of pain to its breathless end. " _Gods._ Just leave it alone, Zelda."

She stared at him helplessly, loathe to use his oath against him again and balking at the absurdity of simply leaving him here to suffer. She slid off her ankles, slouching as she resigned herself to battling his stubbornness all night. She tried miserably, hopelessly, her voice little more than a whisper, "Please?"

And then, against all odds, he sighed quietly, eyes moving begrudgingly to stare through the forest floor in as plain a show of acquiescence as she had ever seen. He took a single, hesitant breath, wrestling with the final vestiges of his own obstinance, before he murmured, so quietly,

"You asked me once if I needed to eat."

She stared, her body alight with pins and needles as the implication wormed its way into her heart and sat there like a stone. His eyes met hers, full of the same tired, dogged determination they always were. The ever-present hunger glinted there, waiting, gnawing, confirming the truth she felt a fool for not having recognized before.

"Why didn't you…?" she trailed off, realizing it was pointless to ask him why. That it was pointless to expect that, for once, he would do the reasonable thing and try not to bear the burden alone. "You've been starving yourself? This entire time?"

"Don't start that again," he groaned, pulling himself upright with some effort, and she blinked incredulously at him.

"What?"

He gestured vaguely. "With the eyes."

She flickered them down to the forest floor, brow puckering, not entirely sure what that was supposed to mean and unaccountably flustered.

"It was manageable at first," he murmured, drawing her eyes back with his voice before she could think better of it. "But it just keeps getting worse."

"And you didn't think to mention this until now?" she demanded, grasping after the anger searing a palpable trail in her chest in a desperate move to stave off grief.

"I didn't expect to be alive this long," he reminded her tiredly, and just like that her rage was doused by his utter lack of reprisal.

She frowned, her thoughts realigning, fueling a curiosity that she knew was dangerous.

She asked him slowly, "What do you eat?"

"Life," he murmured, dropping the word like a stone, and silence grew up around it like weeds. His lips twitched. "Or perhaps death. I'm not really sure where the nourishment comes from, to be honest. I just know how to get it."

"By destroying it," she whispered, all too aware of the truth, of how that hunger had driven him so many times before, through so many ages, to cause so much ruin.

"Draining that spark of life out of something, watching it turn listless…" his eyes slid to hers, dancing with relish at his imaginary meal. "The temptation is always there. When I see Hyrule, so green and teeming with life… When I see you, just coming into your power, so vibrant it almost hurts to look at you…"

His hand drifted unconsciously as he spoke, reaching for her, his touch so dark she could feel the cold of it drawing the warmth from her chest even though it was still inches away. He faltered, his hand flexing rigidly as he remembered himself, and drew back, and she haltingly remembered to breathe, squelching the thrill of fear she felt like a fiery ember under her boot. No doubt he tasted it. No doubt, by the way his eyes glinted in the dark, it was making his mouth water.

"I experimented with less… unsavoury methods," he continued, shifting again, trying to stay ahead of the discomfort. "Those ancient trees in the grasslands were so old, I thought… well. They were no substitute."

She scoffed, remembering. "The apple."

He grimaced. "It tasted like hot metal."

Another silence, dense, heavy, thickened the air between them to the consistency of sludge. A swamp of their own creation, sprawling as far as the eye could see in every direction and even less hospitable than Thyphlo. Her hands fisted on her leggings.

"This is my fault," she decided, swallowing salt, and he tilted his head in a noncommittal gesture.

"If you're referring to the fact that I'm still alive, then yes," he grunted, "I blame you."

He braced his hands on the ground and the tree, shifting his feet beneath him so he could stand and moving to the treeline. The twinkling lights of Hyrule Castle glimmered waxily in the distance, like a spattering of tiny stars cast to the earth and embedded where they struck in the hillside. She sighed, joining him languidly; he had his face pressed into the ribbed bark of another oak, enduring another pang of hunger.

He sent her a leaden glance as it passed, panting, and said wryly, "I suppose petitioning you for a mercy killing is out of the question."

She puffed a breathless, humorless laugh, throwing her gaze hopelessly toward the sky. A swathe of stars hanging over the night mirrored the earthed stars, glistening like lanterns over still water and their reflections.

"Will you make it to the Plateau?"

"I can make it."

She nodded, dreading looking him in the eye when what she was asking of him was so horrible. But she owed him that much. His gaze was soft when she met it, and the guilt in her stomach burned ever brighter.

"Everything I do is awful," she warbled, smiling suddenly in an effort to mask the tears building in her throat. "Whenever I try to make things right I always end up making them worse."

He smiled too, privately, like it was a secret thing. "It has always been the princess's burden to make difficult choices, and then learn to live with them."

"Has it?" She folded her arms, blotting out a cool wind raking down the mountainside, and pressed her lips into a line. "I honestly don't know if I have it in me."

He watched her a furtive half-second before he turned his attention back to the plains. "You do."

And there it was again, that constancy, that indelible confidence that spread through her chest like the heat of too much wine. It was turning her ears pink and her eyes glassy. It was empowering her when she felt so near the precipice of giving up hope.

She crossed to him in two paces and put her arms around his neck, shivering as that unbearable cold passed right through their clothes and into her bones. But she held him close all the same, pressing her mouth into his shoulder as she blinked back grateful tears. He wasn't reciprocating, which neither surprised nor deterred her much; but where she had expected a scoff of disdain or a dramatic roll of the eyes, he had instead gone so incredibly still she was beginning to worry he had turned to stone.

She pulled back slowly, afraid she had crossed a line. His eyes were hard, searching hers with an amalgam of incredulity and no little disapproval.

"Sorry," she whispered, though she wasn't entirely sure why.

He finally murmured, still holding her shoulders gently as though to keep her at bay, "That had better have been motivated by guilt."

She blinked. "What? No. It was—I don't know. I was grateful."

"Grateful?" he demanded, and the sudden anger in his voice put her on edge. "What in all the realms could you possibly be grateful to me for?"

He spat the words like an accusation, and it made her cheeks heat.

"Are you really going to start an argument? Now? Over this, of all things?"

"If you had _any_ sense at all—!" He stumbled back, bracing himself against a tree with one hand and clutching his ribs with the other, and roared in frustration out of clenched teeth as the hunger seared through him again. He fixed her in his fiery gaze as it passed, righting himself crookedly, and panted, "I've plunged Hyrule into darkness too many times to count, eaten her subjects alive, gorged myself on light and blood until there was nothing left; I'm dangerously close to giving into doing it again. And you're _grateful_?"

"And haven't you saved Hyrule," she challenged, frustration and tenacity blowing caution to the wayside, "just as many times? Haven't you always been my strength, no matter how black the darkness?"

He stared, eyes wide and full of fire.

"And do you consider me your strength now?"

For a moment she was afraid to answer, all too aware of the fury thrashing in his eyes, waiting for an excuse to snap loose. But she was also afraid of letting him drag himself along behind her like some kind of leashed animal, tortured and starving and slowly losing himself, without supporting him in turn; without assuring him that she believed he was worth saving.

"Yes," she said, nearly trembling with how simple it was, "I do."

He was motionless for a breathlessly long time, his body suspended in strange disconnect from his eyes as the wrath tore loose there. Then the tension strung between them snapped, and he closed the space to her like lightning, fisting one hand in her hair against her scalp and dragging her up against the nearest tree. She yelped in surprise and at the sting of pain, but when he pressed against her, trapping her between him and the rough bark, the sound died in her throat.

"How many times do I have to teach you this lesson?" he hissed. "How many times do I have to remind you what I am?" He pressed his palm against the side of her face, mercilessly channeling scalding cold straight into her soul, letting it frost the deepest places there until she thought her breath might mist, and she couldn't stop the strangled cry that fell from her mouth. It struck her then, in the oddest way: how many times before he had touched her like this, trying to burn the sense that he was pure evil into her brain, trying to create a distance he hoped she would be wise enough not to cross. He leaned closer, his cool breath feathering her cheekbone and his fist tightening in her hair. "Stop _pitying_ me."

He was trying to intimidate her, trying to hurt her, and it wasn't that he was failing. It was that, for the first time, she could see beyond it—see the desperation and the fear pulsing beneath the hate, feeding it, engorging it, pushing it until it spiraled out of control.

"I do pity you," she managed, defiant, breathless, and the fury burned brighter.

"And that pity is going to get you killed and your kingdom torn apart," he growled. "You look at me and you want to see something mythical, something forgotten. You want to believe your story has a Hero. But it doesn't."

She gulped a breath, tremoring, and bit out, "The Sword chose you."

"Because it _had_ to. The Hero's Spirit can't be reborn if it's trapped inside this body. Don't you understand that?"

He turned, loosing her so suddenly she had to catch herself against the tree, and ran a hand tensely through his hair. She waited for her pulse to calm and the tingling sensation on her scalp to fade, absently touching her cheek; it had gone completely numb, as though every nerve there had died from the cold and would never feel again.

Her thoughts drifted to their connection the night before, when she had let him scour her mind for answers. That experience had been intimate, in a way. She was letting him see parts of her mind no one else had ever seen. Watching the shadow of him lingering amidst the trees, she wondered if the reverse could also be true. She took a hesitant step forward, her eyes flitting away uncertainly as she summoned her courage and held out her hand.

"You could show me," she said, the words coming out so quietly she wasn't sure he had heard.

His head ducked, his shoulders going unnaturally still, before he turned to face her again, staring incredulously at her outstretched hand.

"Do you know what you're asking? What that would do to you?"

She swallowed, holding very still. "You want me to understand what you are."

"Not like this," he frowned, and she scowled.

"Because I'm not strong enough?"

"Because you're too pure."

She flushed at her own petulance and at his sudden, earnest counterargument. Of course he would try to protect her. Didn't he always? Even when he was purposefully unkind, even when she had thought he was just being selfish—it always came back to her.

But she didn't need his protection anymore. He needed hers.

She steeled herself to follow through with a breath, and nodded. He sighed at her; and then the second he turned his back on her again, she closed the space between them, threading her fingers across his scalp, and plunged headlong into his mind.

The transition wasn't the warm, honeyed suspension of her own consciousness. It was dark, a jarring snap of nothingness that snuffed out the world. Finally, the tether went solid, binding them together. At first the impressions were amorphous, translating clumsily into her unpracticed mind: light so hot it burned, dark so cold it ached. Then all at once it sharpened, coming agonizingly into focus, and it was like regaining consciousness on a funeral pyre.

She burned with hatred that couldn't possibly be human, devouring every drop of goodness in her soul like kindling and ravenous for more. The rest was white noise: darkness so blinding she despaired, fury so loud it made her ears bleed, guilt so thick she couldn't breathe, a foul taste reaching so deep in her throat she gagged. The ever-present agony of being ripped in two right down the seam of her spine.

A split second later his hands were closed over her wrists, pulling her out of it, and she heard herself screaming. The contact could barely have lasted the span of a heartbeat, but it had been so intense she couldn't focus on the reality right in front of her. He lowered her to the ground, kneeling with her as she gulped air through panicked tears, and through the fog she heard him calling her name. Finally the sensations started to fade, leaving her trembling noisily and half-blind in his grip.

"There," he growled, when her pupils began to constrict again. "Now you know."

He still sounded breathless himself, his fingers flexing rigidly on her wrists. She searched numbly for his eyes. They were a tumult, furious and depthless as the sea.

He gritted out, voice tremoring, fingers biting down to her bone, "Now _stay out of my head_."

He stood in a sudden flurry of shadow, raking a hand across his scalp as he paced away. She wanted to apologize, wanted to throw herself at his feet and beg for his forgiveness for being so stupid, but she couldn't stop gasping for air long enough to tell him.

"What in _Din's name_ were you thinking?" he hissed, turning back slowly. His shoulders quaked. His composure was hanging by a thread. "Are you _insane_?"

She sobbed quietly, no more able to answer him than she was able to pull back time and rewrite her own foolishness. Her pulse throbbed painfully, still reliving the fear, the anger, the pain. It was like a nightmare that wouldn't drain away. And he was in no state to help her through it.

She met his eyes, and in that moment, still drowning in the memory of his mind, she finally believed him.

He was a monster, and she was a fool.

He paced forward, too suddenly, too close, and she panicked.

" _Stop!_ "

She reached back, power shunting to her fingertips and filling her eyes with light, and touched his mind.

The connection momentarily blinded them both. Her pulse rippled through the weight of an ocean. Darkness bled into light. The moon turned to rain. Fury turned to breath. The chill in her heart burned off and clung wetly to her skin.

She descended out of the light and into a rainstorm, and a distant rumble of thunder nudged her back into herself as he searched her eyes, soaked bangs dripping. They were so blue that for a moment she was fooled; but just beneath the surface, submerged in ice, they were ringed in warm haloes the color of honey.

She waited, breath taut, wondering whose eyes he was seeing. Praying he wouldn't realize what she had done. Praying he was fooled. He drifted closer, unconsciously, it seemed, drawn by warmth, or by memory. They were so close she could feel the heat passing between them, a gentle fire that couldn't be put out by the storm.

Another crackle of thunder sounded on the horizon. And then, barely audible over the constant patter of the rain, he murmured, "So much for your word."

Her expression fell as he exposed her, as he exposed the lie—as ephemeral and tenuous as her misting breath. Conflict raged in his eyes, a war of disappointment, and regret, and something else, a desire she couldn't quite place that was slowly crowding out the rest. He reached, tentatively, to cup her face, his touch full of all the warmth and tenderness an ancient part of her remembered.

And then the desire won out, and he crushed his lips against hers.


End file.
